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Copyright 1902, Underwood & Underwood 

In a merry mood 



Copyright 1902. Underwood & Underwood 

Laying down the law 




Copyright 1902, Underwood & Underwood Copyright 1902, Underwood & Underwood 

Bending forward In earnest argument 

THE EXPRESSIONS OF VARIOUS EMOTIONS 




Copyright lyi'li, Underwood i Lnderwood 

An adverse proposition 



Copyright lyu:;, Underwdud i. Lnaerwoud 

Administering reproof 




Copyright 1902, Underwood & Underwood Copyright 190-J, Underwood & Underwood 

Attitude of urgent appeal Pointing out fallacy 

WITH THE MAINTENANCE OF A STRONG SPINE 



The Efficient Life 



By 

LUTHER H. GULICK, M. D. 

Director of Physical Training 
in the New York City Schools 



WITH DOUBLE-PAGE 
FRONTISPIECE 




New York 

Doubleday, Page & Company 
1910 



1 ^10 



Copyright, 1906, by 
The Phelps Publishing Company 

Copyright, 1906, 1907, by 

DOUBLEDAY, PaGE & COMPANY 

Published, March, 1907 



All rights resewed 

including that of translation into foreign languages 

including the Scandinavian 



Robert L. Owen 
Nov.4j, 2982 



^0 
THEODORE ROOSEVELT 

WHO SOMETIMES LEADS THE SIMPLE LIFE, 

WHO OFTEN LEADS THE STRENUOUS 

LIFE, BUT WHO ALWAYS LEADS 

THE EFFICIENT LIFE 



A WORD TO THE READER 

My father once had medical care of an Hawaiian 
Chief, one of the Kamehamehas, I believe. The 
treatment involved the use of a rather drastic pill 
every evening for a number of days. The result 
of the first day's pill was so favourable that the 
chief took the rest of the boxful at once. His life 
was saved with great difficulty. So do not attempt 
to carry out all the suggestions in this book at once. 

Take a chapter at a time. Mark freely all ideas 
that strike you favourably — jot down at the end of 
each chapter a few words to indicate the extent to 
which you think it applicable to yourself. Only under- 
take at first what seems to fit your one greatest need^ 

Luther H. Gulick, M.D. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER 




PAGE 




Introduction • , • • 


. xi ^ 


I. 


Speed 


3 


II. 


Efficiency . . . . • 


7 


III. 


Life that is Woith While . 


15 


IV. 


States of Mind and States of Body 


. 23 . 


V. 


The Body Shows Character 


35^ 


VI. 


Exercise — Its Use and Abuse 


. 49 


VII. 


Meat, Drink, and the Table • , 


61 - 


VIII. 


The Business of Digestion 


. 73 


IX. 


Waste 


83 


X. 


The Attack on Constipation . • 


. 93 


XI. 


Fatigue . . . • • 


103 


XII. 


Sleep . . . . . 


• 115 


XIII. 


Stimulants and Other Whips 


129 


xrv^ 


The Bath— For Body and Soul 


. 141 


XV. 


Pain — The Danger Signal 


151 


XVI. 


Vision ..... 


. 161 


XVII. 


Vitality — The Armour of Offence 


177 


xvm. 


Growth in Rest .... 


. 187 



IX 



INTRODUCTION 



INTRODUCTION 

TOURING the past year one of my friends^ 
a man of national reputation, died 
at the age of forty-six. It was said that his 
death was the result of overwork, and that 
the ultimate cause was failure of the kidneys. 
I knew his habits of work intimately, and I 
do not believe that the work alone could 
account for the sad result, which took him 
away in the prime of life and at a time when 
all his experiences qualified him to do better 
work than he had ever done before. I 
think the fundamental trouble was that 
he did not know how to run his physical 
machinery. 

Shortly before this, another friend of 
mine, a man of international renown, died 
in his prime. Failure of the kidneys was 
also given as the immediate cause, and over- 
work as the predisposing cause. I have 
no doubt as to the correctness of this diag- 
nosis; but I know that this man, although 
he was living a sedentary life, ate the quan- 
tity and kind of food of a man engaged in 



xiv Introduction 

out-of-door, muscular work. Thus for many 
years he had seriously overtaxed his digestive 
organs, by overloading them with food. 
His heart was always rapid; his arteries 
became hard — he had gout. Much, if not 
all of his trouble could probably have been 
removed had he consented to lessen his 
consumption of meat, thus decreasing the 
work required of the kidneys. 

In the course of the past month one of 
the most brilliant young men of letters in 
America has been obliged to give up his 
work for a long period, in order to seek 
health. Another friend, a woman thirty- 
nine years of age, has for a great part of her 
life had violent headaches every week or 
ten days. She discovered two years ago 
that these were permanently cured by eating 
less starchy food. Her digestion of starch 
was imperfect. And so, I presume, all 
those who read this will be able to recall 
friends who have been either removed 
from life or from full service, at im- 
portant and critical times, simply be- 
cause they did not know how to conduct 
their lives • 



Introduction xv 

This little book is entitled, ''The Efficient 
Life/' because efficiency is the ideal. To 
be strenuous is no end in itself. It is only 
when being strenuous is an aid to efficiency 
that it is worth while; and sometimes the 
quiet life is more effective than the strenuous 
one. The pursuit of health is not an end 
in itself. But to live a full, rich, efficient 
life is an end. I hope that these suggestions 
will prove in book form — as they have 
already proven in lecture form — useful in 
helping people to discover how they may 
improve that degree of efficiency which they 
individually possess. 

Many of the chapters in this book were 
originally lectures delivered at the School 
of Pedagogy, New York Universityc A 
friend who had attended, took my notes, 
manuscript, and fragments, and wrote many 
of the chapters as they now stand. So if 
any of those who know me are so kind as to 
think that I have shown any new and un- 
expected gift of expression in this little 
volume, they must attribute it to Mr. Harry 
James Smith, who is at present one of the 
staff of the Atlantic Monthly. 



xvi Introduction 

Thanks are due the editors of The 
World^s Work and of Good Housekeeping 
for permission to use articles which first 
appeared in those magazines. 

Luther Halsey Gulick. 



SPEED 



CHAPTER I 

TN RUNNING a short distance, such as 
fifty yards, one may put every ounce 
of his energy into each effort. Even breath- 
ing may be suspended to advantage, for the 
ribs when stationary give a firmer support to 
the muscles attached to them which are used 
in running. But the man who undertakes 
to run a mile at the pace of a fifty-yard dash 
will be badly beaten by the man who knows 
the pace of maximum eflSciency and takes 
advantage of it. 

The same law holds in intellectual under- 
takings. It is true that in times of emer- 
gency a man may work intensely and with 
profit, for eighteen hours per day: examina- 
tions may be passed, important addresses 
completed, or sudden and momentous cases 
at law prepared. In the interest of maxi- 
mum efficiency one may subsist at such times 
upon small amounts of predigested foods, 
one may get along without exercise, without 
sleep, without relaxation of any kind. To 
a constitution well organised and intel- 



4 The Efficient Life 

ligently controlled such spurts of work need 
not prove harmfuL But the man who at- 
tempts to do the work of a year or of a life- 
time at this pace will actually accomplish 
far less than if he went more slowly. It is 
not the point of maximum efficiency except 
for a spurt, and spurts do not win distance- 
races unless prepared for by a long period of 
wise running. The man who wins takes a 
pace that he can hold for the entire distance, 
and he will have a little extra ''up his sleeve'' 
to draw upon at the finish when the victory is 
a matter of a few feet or even of a few inches. 



EFFICIENCY 



CHAPTER II 

TT IS the kind of work in which a man 
is engaged which determines for him 
the special meaning of the term efficiency. 
The success of his efforts may depend wholly 
upon the quantity of his output, or it may 
depend upon its quality. Quantity! Qual- 
ity! Upon these two hang all the laws of 
efficiency. 

Mere quantity is the measure of success 
for the man who shovels coal or digs in a 
ditch. Even the best of us have a con- 
siderable amount of pure hack-work to do : 
but as we go up the scale of human activity^ 
quality counts more and more. The con- 
ditions of life when one can do work of the 
highest quality, demanding imagination^ 
insight, vision, and creative power, are 
higher than the conditions when merely the 
maximum in quantity is demanded. The 
higher the quality of the work, the greater 
the nervous cost of it, and the more highly 
perfected must be the machine that does it. 

The conditions for efficiency in the case 
7 



8 The Efficient Life 

of the ordinary day labourer are not complex^ 
His work is that of a coarse machine, turn- 
ing out, hke a grain thresher, a great 
amount of production relatively low in 
grade. His efficiency is but little disturbed 
by constant feeding upon indigestible %dc- 
tuals, by frequent carousals, by a dirty skin 
and bad air. Low-grade production does 
not need a high-grade organism. 

But if under conditions of special strin- 
gency you press the day labourer to the ut- 
most of his strength, one of two things 
happens. Either he goes to pieces and be- 
comes useless; or his machinery alters, 
developing into something more highly 
organised, which requires more delicate care 
and which rebels more certainly under 
abuse. The conditions of health for him — 
that is to say, of ''wholeness," of normal 
power — are more complex, more ex- 
acting. The coarser the machine, the 
more easily it maintains its balance. There 
is a criterion of efficiency for the thresh- 
ing machine, but it is not that of a high- 
^rade watch. 

Men have in a few days developed ideas. 



Efficiency 9 

formulated plans, written poems that were 
worth more to mankind than a lifetime of 
work whose value was estimated in terms of 
quantity. The health of the thinker, of the 
financier, of the executive genius, demands 
a momentary alertness of all the faculties, 
an ability to grasp, to originate, to carry out, 
a trained perception and an intelligent dis- 
crimination. He must be the master of a 
delicate, high-grade machine calculated to 
carry on high-grade work. His health is 
upon an absolutely different level from that 
of the farmhand or the coal shoveller. 

Nothing could be more misleading than 
the familiar phrase, ''healthy as a savage.'" 
The health of the savage is nothing to 
boast of. He has only a moderate control 
over his purely physical faculties. His 
power of endurance is limited, he is helpless 
in an emergency, he has no power of con- 
tinued attention. Health such as his is a 
low-grade achievement. 

For the larger number of city men and 
women, the conditions of efficiency are 
related more to the quality than to the 
quantity of their output. It pays for us te 



lo The Efficient Life 

learn how to run our machines on the higher 
levels of quality-efficiency, *'Live at your 
best," is a safe motto for everyone whose 
work calls for brain rather than brawn. 
The world rewards the man of brains. 
Through an excess of hack-work a man of 
native power may stand in the way of his 
own greatest success, for he is keeping his 
blood so full of the products of overwork 
and his nerve batteries so depleted that 
their best discharge is impossible. Big work 
demands high pressure, reserve power. Any 
engineer can pull his throttle wide open and 
soon lower the steam pressure to such an ex- 
tent that great work is impossible till steam 
is raised again. People are constantly doing 
this. They do not keep up the supply of 
nervous energy to that point where big ideas 
or great execution are possible. They let 
themselves be so ground down by the deadly 
details of daily work that the real things, 
the great opportunities, slip by through lack 
of power to act at the critical moment. 

To give one's self the best chance possible 
for insight, largeness of view, and inspira- 
tion^ is cl^ vly the part of wisdom. It may 



Efficiency ii 

be true, to be sure, that for a man who has 
never known any moments of larger life, 
,w^ho has never had any idea of value, the 
effort necessary to keep the machine on 
those high levels of power would not be 
worth while. A draught horse does not 
need for its kind of efficiency the same 
care that the race horse demands. The 
steam shovel does not need the special care 
bestowed upon a watch. 

It is my conviction, however, that capa- 
bilities of a peculiar character exist in 
almost everyone; and that a man's value 
to society depends, to a large extent, upon 
his discovering and developing his special 
talent. The number of those who have a 
right to live complacently upon any other 
level than that of maximum efficiency is 
certainly small, for to do so implies that no 
further growth is possible for them. 

It is not the intention in this book to pro- 
vide an easy recipe for the development of 
genius. What it seeks is to enable each 
man to discover and secure for himself the 
best attainable conditions for his own daily 
life. It aims to apply to the various details 



VI The Efficient Life 

oi thsrt life our present knowledge of physiol- 
ogy and psychology in a common sense 
and practical way. 

For each of us it is possible to increase 
the duration of his best moments and to 
render them more frequent. It is also pos- 
sible for us to reduce the number and the 
length of those periods of depression and 
low vitality when our work miscarries and 
our lives lack snap and enthusiasm. If we 
succeed in bringing about such a change, w^e 
shall have raised the whole plane of our 
living to something higher and more admir- 
able. Our work will be productive of 
results that would otherwise have been 
quite beyond our reach. 

There are conditions for each individual 
under which he can do the most and the best 
work. It is his business to ascertain those 
conditions and to comply with them. 



LIFE THAT IS WORTH 
WHILE 



CHAPTER III 

T IFE is not only for work. It is for 
one's self and for one's friends. The 
degree of joy that a man JSnds in his work 
is due to two things : the intensity or fullness 
of his vitality, and the congenial character 
of the work itself. When one is thoroughly 
well and vigorous, the mere joy of living, of 
merely being alive, is very great. At such 
a time the nature of the work does not mat- 
ter to a large extent. The sense of having 
power at your command, and the delight of 
exerting it even in coal shovelling or selling 
goods is enough. When one is full of life, 
the mere feel of fresh water or air on the 
skin, the taste of the plainest food, the 
exertion of muscular effort, the keeness of 
one's vision, the sight of colour in the sky, 
or the sound of the wind or the waves — it 
takes nothing beyond these to make one 
jubilant, enthusiastic. 

To a man who is fatigued such sensations 
are sure to be without zest, even if they are 
not positively unpleasant. One of the com- 

15 



i6 The Efficient Life 

monest reasons for the blase or pessimistic 
feelings that so often come when youth is 
over is that one's system is constantly tired 
and rebels at additional sense-stimuli. 

As a matter of fact, the vividness of one's 
feelings, of one's emotional experience, ought 
not to depart with youth. In a normal life 
it should deepen, to be sure, and be respon- 
sive to even larger and greater things; but 
it should retain its brightness and depth of 
colour. Love, hope, desire, appreciation, 
ambition and determination should grow, 
not diminish, with experience. 

To live at a low level is to deaden every 
faculty for high thought and high feeling — 
it makes drudgery not only of work but also 
of life. 

Many mothers slave for their children so 
many hours a day that they have but little 
energy left with which to enjoy them and 
love them. As a result, the dullness and 
drudgery of existence are all they come to 
experience. One mother of five children 
for years took at least an hour a day for 
rest and quiet reading alone by herself. 
Nothing but absolute necessity would 



Life That is Worth While 17 

induce her to break into this hour. The 
result of this is not only that she has kept 
her own superb health, but more than this : 
she is a constant joy and inspiration to her 
children, her husband and her friends. It 
is true that she might have done more dust- 
ing or mending stockings than she actually 
accomplished, but it would have been at the 
sacrifice of that whole part of her life which 
meant the most to herself and others. 
Instead of being able to enter upon the rou- 
tine of each day with eagerness and satisfac- 
tion, it would have been the intolerable 
drudgery that it is for so many tired mothers. 
Even in the matter of the quantity of 
the work accomplished it seems probable 
that the daily rest was wise, for the remainder 
of the day was lived more intensely, its 
work was done more rapidly, and best of all, 
that balance and poise were preserved 
which we all lose if over tired. When 
fatigued to a certain point, every one of us 
loses his sense of proportion: we go on 
fretting over little things and doing ineffec- 
tual work just because we have not strength 
enough to stop. 



1 8 The Efficient Life 

Children inevitably grow away from 
mothers who do not keep themselves grow- 
ing and their lives vivid. The mere minis- 
tering to the physical needs of children is not 
enough. They need our best selves after 
they are babies. During the years of their 
childhood and later we shall only serve them 
fully by living at our best, by living with 
inspiration and power. This it is impossible 
to do if we are daily over fatigued. We 
must live joyful, rich, vivid lives, not only 
for ourselves, but for our children and for 
all whom we love. 

Full living, high-level living, is one of the 
conditions of continuous growth. Growth 
in power to see and to appreciate and to do 
should increase every year right into old age 
itself. You remember how the old scholar 
speaks in Browning's ''By the Fireside": 

My own, confirm me, if we tread 

This pathway back, is it not in pride. 

To think how httle we dreamed it led 
To an age so blest that by its side 

Youth seems the waste indeed ? 

It is certain that if a man, who starts out 
with a good heredity, sets himself at the 



Life That is Worth While 19 

effort of constantly living at his best, the 
right kind of growth will come to him. If 
we take the machine at any stage and crowed 
it to its full capacity every day, we not only 
get low-level work from it, but there is 
failure all along the line. We bless the 
world by being happy, full of dash and vim, 
ready for any enterprise, alert for the new 
idea or the new application of the old one. 

For a man to look back at childhood as 
the one happy time in life shows that he has 
missed something important. The happiest 
people are the men and women in the full 
maturity of their powers, who have kept 
youth's vividness of feeling, but w^ho have 
added to this those great resources of life 
that are not open to children. 

This matter of keeping one's self on a 
high level relates then not only to better 
work, but in an equally important degree to 
the attainment of a fuller, richer, more 
joyous life. 



STATES OF MIND AND 
STATES OF BODY 



CHAPTER IV 

PSYCHOLOGISTS are learning nowa- 
^ days that it is impossible to treat the 
mind and the body as if they were really 
distinct. They have discovered that the 
two are so closely bound up together that 
nothing can affect one without affecting the 
other in a greater or less degree. 

Our feelings, our emotional experiences, 
were formerly treated as "" mental phenom- 
ena." We still keep the phrase ''states of 
mind." But we might just as accurately 
say ''states of body." There is no such 
thing as an emotion without its bodily 
expression. 

A man gets angry. His breath comes 
short, his heart beats violently, the blood 
rushes to his face, his hands clench, his 
limbs may even quiver and grow tense. If 
you could subtract all these symptoms from 
a fit of anger, it is hard to say how much of 
the fit would still remain. They are essen- 
tial parts of that "state of mind." 

An emotion may involve all the functions 

2S 



24 The Efficient Life 

of the body — circulation, blood pressure, 
muscular tension, respiration, glandular 
activities, and the rest. 

Even ordinary thinking has its bodily 
eJBfects, though they are not often brought 
to our attention. If I put an exceedingly 
delicate thermometer in each hand, and 
then give my attention to my right hand 
with all the concentration of mind I can 
muster, it will soon begin to grow warmer 
than my left. Somehow or other the blood 
circulation in it has been increased; even 
the diameter of it is greater, and all the 
tissue changes in it are going on at a higher 
speed. 

The scientist's explanation of this is 
interesting. During all the history of man's 
evolution from a lower form, the act of 
thinking, he says, has normally been con- 
nected with some activity of the body. 
Men thought because they were going to 
act. Thought had its origin for the sake 
of action. 

This association of the two became 
ingrained, and even now when we t^mk in 
such a way that some part of the body is 



States of Mind and States of Body 25 

concerned the automatic nerve centres begin 
to increase the blood supply to that part so 
that it may be ready for action. 

A man thinks of running. The nerve 
centres send more blood to his legs; all the 
muscles used in running get an increased 
supply of it. A man is hungry; he thinks 
of a good, juicy beefsteak. Immediately 
more blood is sent to the muscles of mastica- 
tion and to the salivary glands. Saliva is 
poured into the mouth, and even the walls 
of the stomach begin to secrete gastric 
juice and to prepare themselves for the 
digestion of the hypothetical dinner. 

Now this fact has a tremendously practi- 
cal application. Suppose that a man has an 
uneasy sensation in the locality of his heart 
which is due, let us say, to overeating or to 
gas in the stomach. But he begins to think 
that he has heart disease. He reads the 
*'ads" in the newspapers to learn about 
the symptoms — and he learns about them. 

^* A sense of constriction about the chest.'' 
Yes, that is his difficulty exactly! ''Slight 
pain on deep breathing, palpitation of 
the heart after vigorous exercise'' — it is 



26 The Efficient Life 

evidently a serious case ! He begins to worry 
about it. Worry interferes with his sleep. 
It interferes also with his digestion; he does 
not get well nourished. 

Bad sleep and bad digestion make him 
worse and worse. Each one aggravates the 
other. And all the time he keeps thinking 
about the heart. In the end, his thinking 
actually affects its condition, until he suc- 
ceeds in fastening on himself a functional 
difficulty which may be a really serious 
and permanent trouble — and the whole of 
it can be traced back to his crooked think- 
ing about that little pain in his chest. 

This is no parable. It is the record of 
hundreds of actual cases. Every physi- 
cian comes into contact with them. 

A man who keeps worrying about the 
state of his liver, will almost be sure to have 
trouble with it eventually. Indigestion can 
be brought on in the same way, and a long 
list of other ailments. 

The nervous system has adapted itself 
to the increasing complexity of modern life. 
It has grown more sensitive. It has become 
more delicate in its adjustments. This lets 



States of Mind and States of Body 27 

us do a higher grade of work when we are 
at our best; but the machinery gets out of 
order more easily. The role that the 
psychic part of us plays in the government 
of the rest is increasing in importance all 
the time. 

That is why worry is such a tremen- 
dously expensive indulgence. Worry is 
nothing but a diluted, dribbling fear, long- 
drawn out; and its effects on the organism 
are of the same kind, only not so sudden. 

No kind of psychic activity can be so 
persistently followed as worry. A fit of 
anger exhausts itself in a short time. Con- 
centrated intellectual work reaches the 
fatigue point after a few hours. But worry 
grows by what it feeds on. It increases in 
proportion as it gets expression. You can 
worry more and worry harder on the fourth 
day than you could on the first. Every 
normal activity is strangled by it, and it is 
only a question of time before the man who 
worries hard enough will be sick or un- 
balanced. 

But there is another side to the situatiouo 
If states of mind can hinder a man's eflSi- 



28 The Efficient Life 

ciency, they can also help it. Positive and 
healthful emotions bring increased power. 
The simplest food taken when we are wor- 
ried will often enough cause indigestion; 
while a man can go to a banquet and pile in 
raw clams, oxtail soup, roast beef, mush- 
rooms, veal, ca^-iare, roast duck, musk- 
melons, roquefort, and coffee, have a superb 
time, and never feel any ill effects. Not 
everything depends on the state of mind; 
but much does. 

There is certainly plenty of foolish philos- 
ophy connected vdth Christian Science, 
mental healing, and other kindred move- 
ments; but thousands of people have been 
tremendously benefited by them. This is 
largely due to the emphasis they all lay upon 
the healthful emotions, upon the positive, 
the believing, the buoyant, and hopeful 
attitude towards one's self and one's troubles. 

To resolve to ''play the game" and to 
play it for all it is worth is the best start a 
man can take toward setting himself righto 
I know people who are really out of order, 
vriiose heart or lungs are really crippled, 
but who make the best of it, who have 



States of Mind and States of Body 29 

learned just what they can do and what 
they cannot do. They do not think about 
their troubles, and no one would even know 
that anything was wrong with them. They 
lead efficient lives. They accomplish more 
than most people in perfect health. 

I know other men who have nothing serious 
the matter with them, but who fail to be 
efficient just because they are always turn- 
ing their introspective microscopes upon 
their condition. They are troubled about 
everything they eat and wonder whether it 
will hurt them or not. They suspect each 
glass of water or milk to contain injurious 
microbes. They do not eat strawberries 
because they are afraid appendicitis may 
lurk there. They do not drink water at 
meals because they have been told it causes 
indigestion. They never dare let go of 
themselves and have a good time, for fear 
they may overdo. The real root of all 
their misery is their state of mind. If they 
only knew how to get at that, they could 
become as well off as the best of us. 

But one great difficulty with people who 
worry is that they do not know how to get 



30 The Efficient Life 

at it. They know that it does them harm, 
and they make an earnest resolution to 
stop. There is no use in that. Nobody 
ever stopped worrying by making good 
resolutions. It is contrary to the first 
principles of psychology; the mind does not 
work that way. 

The more a man braces himself against 
worry, the more worry will get its grip on 
him. He even begins to worry lest he is 
going to worry. He v/orries over his good 
resolutions, and worries because he is not 
living up to them. 

Emotions do not have handles that can be 
gotten hold of by main strength, by an act 
of the will. You cannot attack them sub- 
jectively. 

A man who is in the dumps can say to 
himself : ' ' Come now, brace up ! Be cheer- 
ful!'' but that will not make him so. What 
he can do and do successfully, is to make 
himself act the way a cheerful man would 
act: to walk and talk the way a cheerful 
man would walk and talk, and to eat what a 
cheerful man would eat — and after a time 
the emotion slips into line with his assumed 



States of Mind and States of Body 31 

attitude. He actually becomes what he 
has been pretending to be. 

We can get at worry in exactly the same 
manner. We can make ourselves do cer- 
tain specific things. This is an objective, 
not subjective method. 

See that all the hours of the day are so 
full of interesting and healthful occupations 
that there is no chance for worry to stick its 
nose in. 

Exchanging symptoms is a vicious pastime. 
It always makes the symptoms themselves 
worse; and it is contagious: it gives them 
to other people by suggestion. Nothing 
could be more demoralizing than the way 
invalids, semi-invalids, and chronic com- 
plainers get together day after day to talk 
over how they feel. Crap-shooting would be 
a more uplifting occupation. If such cases 
ever get cured, it is in spite of themselves. 

Every man should be provided with his 
own smoke consumer. It is a menace to 
the community to have him pouring out 
clouds of black smoke over his unoffending 
friends. They will not thank him for it. 
And the soot may stick to them. 



32 The Efficient Life 

Every man ought to have a hobby of 
some kind or other, one which demands a 
certain amount of physical work, so that 
when he gets through his business there will 
be something interesting for him to do — 
something which he can talk and think 
about with pleasure. The business of the 
following day will go more smoothly, more 
successfully, if it is forgotten for a while. 
When a man is tired there is no use in keep- 
ing his head at work over business. It is 
the old difficulty of the bow that is never 
unbent. 

The man who will persistently ylay well 
is doing something worth while ; he is taking 
the most sensible and practical method of 
really getting there. He can act happy 
even if he does not feel so. He can stand 
up straight, look the world in the face, 
breathe deeply. He can make up his mind 
to tell a funny story at the table even if it 
kills him. 

It will not kill him. 



THE BODY SHOWS 
CHARACTER 



CHAPTER V 

TVyf EN with thick, straight, strong necks 
^ are as a rule good fighters. They 
may not be quick, but they are usually 
tenacious. They do not know when they 
are ^^ licked.'' Theodore Roosevelt is a 
good illustration of the fighting physique 
and carriage. Some pictures are given of 
him in order to show how one may main- 
tain a '^strong'' carriage during the succes- 
sive expression of many and divergent 
emotional states. 

Many city business men in middle life 
have bodies that disgrace them. Every- 
where you see fat, clumsy, unsightly bodies ; 
stooped, flabby, feeble bodies ; each and 
every degree of dilapidation and ineffi- 
ciency. These bodies are not capable ser- 
vants of their owners. They cannot do 
half the work they ought to do. They can- 
not give joy and pride. They do not pro- 
mote self-respect. 

One reason for this is their carriage. 
The majority of men you pass on a city 

55 



36 The Efficient Life 

street carry themselves in a slovenly manner. 
Observe this the next time yoa are out. 
Perhaps the first man you notice will be 
slipping along with his chest flat abdomen 
protuberant, head forward. The next will 
be fat and remind you of an inverted wedge: 
slim in the chest, but gradually spreading 
out below. With every step he takes he has 
to make a special effort. His weight is a 
costly drain upon his energy. The third 
m^an may be tall and thin, with a difference 
of about two inches in the height of his 
shoulders. He is a bookkeeper. Through 
his habit of always carrying something on 
his left arm and of bending over his desk with 
his weight on his right shoulder, he has 
gradually stretched the muscles out of shape. 
Not only has the position of the shoulders 
been altered, but there is even a slight 
curvature of the spine itself. 

You will meet with all the variations on 
these three principal types of bad carriage. 
Not one man out of ten carries himself so as 
to look his best. He does not even give true 
indication of his real self. He possesses more 
courage, more personality, than he shows. 



The Body Shows Character 37 

But looks are not the main thing. The 
way a man stands and walks has bearing 
upon his health, upon his efficiency. If he 
stands always with his chest flat and his 
head forward, his breathing is shallow and 
he never makes his diaphragm do its full 
work. By itself, the effects of this are 
enough to help rob him of vigour. In the 
case of the man whose abdomen is so over- 
laid with fat that he walks clumsily, it is 
also true that he has an impaired blood 
circulation and defective respiration. 

One reason for the bad carriage you see 
in people is that they do not know what is 
good carriage, nor how to acquire it. The 
commonest direction is, ''Hold up your 
head/' That does not hit at the real 
difficulty at alL A man can take any 
amount of pains with his head and chin, and 
still keep in abominable position. Changing 
the angle of the head does not improve 
things 

** Throw your shoulders back,'' is an- 
other familiar piece of advice, and one 
which comes no nearer the point than the 
first. The position of the shoulders has 



38 The Efficient Life 

hardly any effect upon the position of the 
body. The shoulders hang upon the out- 
side of the body like blinds on a house. 
Shift their place as much as you like; you 
do not change the shape of the chest- 
cavity. 

There is only one way of doing that, and 
that is by getting the back and neck where 
they belong, by keeping the spine erect. 
This proposition is easier to talk about than 
to carry out. It cannot be carried out unless 
a man is willing to make a determined effort. 
Attention is what counts. 

Students in military schools acquire good 
habits of standing and walking during the 
first six or eight weeks of their course. 
They acquire them so thoroughly that the 
matter needs practically no further care 
during later years o Constant attention is 
the explanation. At a military school a 
new student is kept watch of during all his 
waking hours o He is not allowed to stand, 
to sit, to walk, in any position except the 
best. Thus the whole organism gets grad- 
ually trained into the new habit. 

The military student is also put through 



The Body Shows Character 39 

special exercise for arms and back; but 
exercise is not the main factor in the pro- 
cess. People have the notion that exercise 
will make the muscles of a man's back so 
strong that they will pull him up straight 
without any thought on his part. This is 
contrary to facts. The back of a coal 
shoveller is bent, even though it is covered 
with coils of muscle. The truth is that a 
man's back tends to keep the same position 
in rest which it had during exercise. The 
coal heaver does his Vv^ork with a bent back, 
and during rest it stays bent. 

Standing straight is primarily a matter 
of habit, not of musclcc It depends upon 
a man's nervous control. The nerve centres 
need to be trained; and this can be accom- 
plished only by constant and persistent 
attention. 

If a man would rigidly hold his body in 
good position for two months, he would 
probably keep on doing so always. He 
would have formed neural and muscular 
habits that would look out for the matter 
themselves. But there must be no ''times 
off/' no let up in the forming of a habit. 



40 The Efficient Life 

Now there is a simple direction that fits 
most cases: Kee^p the neck "pressed hack 
against the collar. That will do the work. 

The ribs are attached to the spine in such 
a way that when the spine is right, they are 
held in the best possible position. This 
increases the chest-cavity, the lungs have 
free room to expand, the heart action is 
vigorous and unimpeded the diaphragm 
gets a good purchase on the chest- walls. 

The effect on the organs lower down is 
equally important. The stomach on the 
left side and the liver on the right side fit up 
close against the concave diaphragm muscle. 
The circulation tends to be poorer in the 
liver than anyw^here else in the body. This 
is because the blood cannot flow through it 
directly and freely, but must be squeezed 
through a double network of small veins and 
capillaries. This is one reason why seden- 
tary people are so likely to be bilious. 

The liver is something like a sponge, and 
the diaphragm is like a hand that rests over 
it. When the diaphragm contracts vigor- 
ously, it exerts a certain pressure on the 
liver. Then it relaxes. This alternate con- 



The Body Shows Character 41 

traction and relaxation is one of the main 
factors in keeping the Hver working well. 
I have known many people who were slightly 
bilious to remedy their trouble completely by 
simply taking deep breathing exercises three 
or four times a day. 

It is clear enough that a stooping posture 
must decrease the efficiency of the heart 
and the lungs^ and injure the work of the 
liver. But its bad effects do not stop there. 
When the abdomen is habitually relaxed 
and allowed to sag fon\^ard — as usvially 
happens when people stand badly — all the 
important organs inside slip downward a 
little; they lie lower than they should. I 
have often known the lower border of the 
stomach to have dropped two or three inches 
from this single cause. Just why this con- 
dition should result as it does, I am still 
uncertain. Perhaps it is due to a stretching 
of the nerves or blood vessels — ^but at all 
events, the tone of the whole system is sure 
to be lowered; the organs grow flabby and 
do their work sluggishly. 

Time and again I have succeeded in 
curing troubles which I was assured were 



42 The Efficient Life 

organic and serious just by getting the 
patient to stand up straight, to walk correctly, 
and to breathe deeply. 

Now it is a sad fact that simply knowing 
how to stand up straight will not remedy 
the difficulty. What counts is not the num- 
ber of remedies we may have on our tongue's 
end, but the use we make of the remedies. 
Directions have been supplied. How is a 
man going to carry them out ? This is the 
most practical question of all. 

In the first place, he must depend upon 
himself. There are many braces sold that 
pretend to accomplish the desired results. 
They claim to hold the shoulders back, to 
hold the head up, to set the faulty position 
of the trunk right. But the truth is that the 
longer a man uses braces, the less able he 
will be to stand up straight. 

If the braces are strong enough to make a 
real pull on the shoulders, they are doing the 
work that belongs to the muscles; and that 
means that the muscles are getting less and 
less capable every day of doing it for them- 
selves. It is the old law of use and disuse. 

In any case, as we have already seen, it is 



The Body Shows Character 43 

not the shoulders that are really at the root 
of the trouble. Round shoulders are the 
result of bad carriage, not the cause of it. 

The next pointer is never to exercise 
except in a good position. The body will 
tend to keep that position after the exercise 
is over. Visit any gymnasium you like and 
observe the way the men stand at the pulleys. 
They have no realisation of the effect it will 
have upon their habits of body carriage. 
During all exercises the body should be held 
in the finest position possibleo 

Then finally there are one or two simple 
exercises that have a special value for this 
very difficulty. 

(1) Inhale slowly and as strongly as 
possible. At the same time press the neck 
back firmly against the collar. Now hold 
it there hard. There is no harm in doing 
this in an exaggerated way. The object is 
to straighten out that part of the back which 
is directly between the shoulders. This 
deepens the chest. 

(2) For men who are fat, this exercise 
is suggested: 

Keep a good standing position. Draw 



44 The Efficient Life 

in the abdomen vigorously as far as 
possible. Hold it there a moment and let 
it out again. Repeat this ten times the 
first day, and increase until it can be done 
fifty times both morning and night. Every 
time you think of it during the day, with- 
draw the abdomen vigorously. This will 
strengthen the muscles that hold it in 
placce 

Queer as it may seem on first thought, 
there are times when it is a good thing to 
drop or ''slump/' as it is commonly called. 
TMien one becomes exceedingly fatigued, 
the blood pressure of the body is lowered. 
The blood tends to accumulate in the abdo- 
men under such conditions. When the 
back bends forward and the chest gets fiat, 
the ribs press upon the abdominal contents. 
The result is that more blood is pressed 
into the general circulation. Thus blood 
pressure is raised. 

The attitude of action is that of standing 
firmly. The attitude of contemplation and 
of intense attention, as well as of fatigue, is 
with the head bent forward and very pos- 
sibly with the hand supporting the head. 



The Body Shows Character 45 

If a person habitually takes this position, 
then it is of no value when he is fatigued. 
Only the person who stands well usually 
can take advantage of this stimulus to the 
circulation when fatigued. 

Good carriage is directly connected with 
a man's feeling of self-respect- If he 
slouches along with his eyes on the ground 
and his abdomen sagging, he is not in the 
position to have the strong and healthy 
feelings of self respect that the man has who 
stands erect, looks the world straight in the 
eye, keeps his chest prominent, his abdomen 
in, and his body under thorough control — 
a ''chesty'' man. 

If you are walking along the street and 
wake up to the fact that you are carrying 
yourself poorly, take the mental attitude of 
standing straight, as well as the physical 
one. Look at the men you meet and imagine 
that each one of them owes you a dollar. 
Put even a suggestion of arrogance into 
your position. Hold your head well back; 
look people squarely in the face. This will 
not only give the impression to others that 
you possess the power you want, but it will 



46 The Efficient Life 

actually tend to bring that power to 
you. 

Flat chest, flabby muscles, jelly-like abdo- 
men do not make for what we call a strong 
personality. 

Keep the neck against the collar. 



EXERCISE-ITS USE AND 
ABUSE 



CHAPTER VI 

^VJOT one man in a thousand has time to 
•^ ^ keep himself in the best possible 
physical condition. To do so would con- 
sume the largest part of his waking day. 
People who write books on hygiene have a 
way of overlooking this. 

One book I have seen recommends that 
the teeth should be carefully brushed after 
each meal, the crevices cleaned out with 
dental thread, the mouth swabbed out with 
absorbent cotton and rinsed with an anti- 
septic wash. This process, it also adds, 
should be gone through with before retiring 
and on rising. 

There is too much to do on other lines to 
permit the attainment of perfection in any 
one. What we want is that degree of culti- 
vation that will enable us to live and work 
most intensely. We cannot spend our whole 
time oiling and cleaning the machine. 

It is efficiency we aim at, not perfection. 

We want to find a practical middle 
ground, somehow, where we can get the 

49 



50 The Efficient Life 

largest returns with the least sacrifice. 
Sacrifices have to be made somewhere, in 
any case. We have to let some things go 
on in a world of hard facts. How are we 
to decide which? 

In the matter of exercise, the question for 
us is not: How much exercise will bring 
good results ? That is a theoretical, not 
a practical, consideration. The real ques- 
tion is: How much exercise is it worth 
while for a man to take if he wants to keep 
on the top level of efficiency.^ 

It is certain that a man cannot think and 
act energetically unless his nerves and 
muscles are in good working order. Muscles 
that are never used get flabby and soft; 
they become incapable of obeying the will 
promptly and effectively. The effects on 
the nerves that control them are equally 
bad. They lose their power of responding 
vividly. They cannot be relied upon to do 
expert work. 

President G. Stanley Hall of Clark Uni- 
versity calls the flabby muscle the chasm 
between willing and doing. 

Enough exercise, then, to keep the muscles 



Exercise — Its Use and Abuse 51 

of the body firm and sensitive is what we 
must aim at. For a man whose chief busi- 
ness in Hfe is headwork, there is Kttle to be 
gained in building up muscular tissue beyond 
that point. He may do it for recreation if 
he likes; but that is a different matter. 

Many of us come to dislike the thought of 
exercise. The very word suggests con- 
scientious and disagreeable quarter-hours 
spent with dumb-bells or pulley weights in 
the solitude of one's apartment, or, worse yet, 
on the floor of a gymnasium. 

There is little use in recommending an 
elaborate system of home gymnastics. That 
would be easy to do. Hundreds of them 
have been recently put on the market. 
People often take them up with religious 
enthusiasm and get splendid results out of 
them — -for a time. But I have known few 
who kept it up long. That does not mean 
that the exercise system was at fault. It 
simply means that it was not calculated to 
hold the interest. A man's enthusiasm for 
dumb-bell gymnastics is almost sure to 
wane after a while. There is nothing to 
keep him at it excepting will power and 



52 The Efficient Life 

conscience, and they cannot bear the 
strain forever. 

Therefore, I do not propose an elaborate 
system of private gymnastics. If a man 
forces himself to carry on exercise simply 
because he thinks it is his duty, more than 
half its benefits are lost. For a really 
valuable exercise is one which reaches 
beyond the muscles and the digestive organs; 
it braces up and stimulates the mind. 

When a man is being bored to death, he is 
not deriving the most benefit from his 
occupation, even though that occupation 
may be a strenuous half-hour of chest 
weights. 

The kind of exercise that hits the mark is 
the kind a man likes for its own sake; and 
the kind a man likes for its own sake has 
something of the play-spirit in it — the life 
and go of a good game. It will give a chance 
for some rivalry, a definite goal to aim at, 
a point to win — something, in other words, 
to enlist his interest and arouse his enthu- 
siasm. 

You cannot look at such exercise merely 
for its effects on the neuro-muscular ap- 



Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 53 

paratus. It reaches the man's very self. 
Its psychological value is as important as 
its physiological. 

The good a man gets out of a brisk horse- 
back ride in the park is something more than 
what comes simply from the activity of his 
muscular system, or from the effect of the 
constant jolting upon the digestive organs. 
There is the stimulus to the whole system 
that comes from his filling his lungs with 
fresh, out-of-door air. There is the exhil- 
aration of sunshine and blue sky, and of the 
wind on the skin. There is the excitement 
of controlling a restive animal. All this 
makes the phenomenon a complex one, 
something much larger than the mere term 
"exercise'' would imply, 

A man could sit on a mechanical horse in 
a gymnasium and be jolted all day without 
getting any of these larger effects. 

The best forms of exercise will call the 
big muscles of the body into play, the 
muscles that do the work. This gives bulk 
effects. It reaches the whole system. Playing 
scales on the piano, though exhausting to one's 
self and others, does not belong to this class. 



54 The EfBcient Life 

Exercise should not be too severe. Many 
ambitious people injure themselves through 
trying to accomplish too much along this 
line. Where the mind is already tired, the 
body can only lose by violent exertion, even if 
it is only for a few moments. Exercise breaks 
down tissue, exhausts nerve energy. If any 
good is to be gained from it, this body waste 
must be repaired. But when the system 
is already exhausted, it cannot afford an 
additional expenditure. A city man with a 
conscience is in danger of making too hard 
work of his exercise when he takes it at all. 

Tennis is a game that nervous, excitable, 
overworked people like to play. They 
ought to avoid it. It works them too hard 
and too fast. Instead of resting them, it 
wears them out. 

There is no better outdoor exercise for a 
city man than a game of golf. The alternate 
activity and rest that it provides for, the 
deep breathing caused by the necessary hill- 
climbing, the sociability of the game — all 
these are admirable features. Rowing, 
paddling, bowling, tramping — any form 
of recreation that brings a variety of 



Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 55 

physical exertion and that appeals to a man's 
interest and enthusiasm — belong in the class 
of ''A 1'' exercises. 

The fact remains, however , that a busy 
man cannot go riding in the park every day, 
nor spend an hour and a half on the golf 
links, desirable as this may be. He ought 
to have that kind of recreation — he must get 
it at intervals — but as a daily habit it is out 
of the question. From Monday morning to 
Saturday noon he needs to economise every 
minute. He wants to know what the 
minimum amount of time is that he can 
give to exercise, and still keep on the safe 
side of the danger line. 

There are many people who keep well 
and who do their work successfully without 
ever taking any formal exercise at all. A 
man who looks out intelligently for the 
character of his food, who eats properly, 
attends to the demands of his bowels, keeps 
his skin in good order and provides him- 
self with a decent amount of mental relaxa- 
tion — such a man can often go for a long 
time without any special exercise. 

But a man who eats big dinners must gefe 



56 The Efficient Life 

exercise. So must a man who works in a 
badly ventilated room. So must a man 
who has a tendency to worry, or to consti- 
pation, or to headache. Indeed the number 
is very small of those who escape the need. 

It is true, however, that in most cases two 
minutes of vigorous exercise a day would 
serve the merely muscular purposes. This 
is enough to keep the muscles reasonably 
hard and to keep the functions of the system 
in good working shape. It will have a bigger 
ejffect, to be sure, on the feelings than on the 
muscles, but the muscles will get what is 
imperative. 

The average city business man without 
any physical impediment to fight against, 
can probably get along successfully on such 
an exercise schedule as the following : 

(1) Five minutes each day of purely 
muscular exercise, such as can be taken 
perfectly well in one's room without any 
special apparatus. Five minutes a day 
does not put a great tax on one's conscience. 
There is every possibility of a man's being 
able to keep it up. This is to keep external 
muscles in trim. 



Exercise— Its Use and Abuse 57 

(2) Short intervals during the day of 
fresh air, brisk walking, deep breathing. 
This can all be secured in the regular order 
of the day's business. A man can easily 
spend as much as half an hour walking out 
of doors every day. This is for heart, lungs, 
and digestion. 

(3) The reservation of at least one day a 
week for rest and recreation, for being out 
of doors, for playing games, etc. This is 
an essential. This is for both body and 
mindo A man who thinks he can get along 
without at least one vacation time a week 
simply proves his ignorance. He ruins his 
chances of doing really efficient work; for 
the mind cannot concern itself all the time 
with a single subject and still keep any 
freshness, spontaneity, or initiative. Such 
a man makes a mere machine of himself. 
He is sacrificing his personality and all that 
it might count for. 



MEAT, DRINK, AND THE 
TABLE 



CHAPTER VII 

lUrUNGER is an instinct, and an instinct 
is the log-book of thousands of genera- 
tions before us — the record of their experi- 
ences. Hence it has some authority. It is 
more likely to be right than the latest health 
food advertisement. 

But there are cases in which we cannot 
trust to our instincts without danger. The 
fact that an instinct has come down to us 
from prehistoric times, when men lived 
differently from ourselves, makes its direc- 
tions occasionally out of date. It has not 
adapted itself to any of the special conditions 
of modern civilisation. It sticks in the 
old rut and calls as strongly as ever for satis- 
faction ; but it does not speak with the same 
authority. Our present needs may demand 
something quite different. 

Take the case of the average child and 
the sugar supply. There is no doubt but that 
he is too fond of it. His appetite is a very 
bad guide in that particular matter. But 
the explanation is simple enough. Remember 

61 



62 The Efficient Life 

the high value of sugar as an energy producer. 
Remember, too, how rarely in nature it 
occurs in the simple form. For our aboriginal 
ancestors sugar was a hard commodity to 
get; fruits and honey were about the only 
sources of supply. Yet their bodies needed 
it. Consequently, a strong, instinctive crav- 
ing for it was developed in them — strong 
enough to make them ready to surmount ob- 
stacles and face danger in its pursuit. 

Conditions have altered since then. We 
are now furnished with a practically unlimited 
supply — enormously beyond what we actu- 
ally need. Yet the instinct remains, still 
loyal to the old rut. All of this throws light 
upon the familiar triple phenomenon of 
child, jam-cupboard, doctor. 

Perhaps the most important changes of 
all, so far as the body is concerned, have 
come in the matter of our daily occupation 
— the way we get our living. The ' ' natural'* 
way is the primitive way: hunting, climb- 
ing, diving— forms of vigorous bodily activ- 
ity. The body was intended to carry on a 
large amount of physical work, to be con- 
stantly exerting intense muscular effort. 



Meat, Drink, and the Table 63 

We do not live that way now. The con- 
ditions of our industrial civilisation have 
put an end to it. Machinery does most of 
our heavy work for us. We live by our 
brains. We walk a few miles a day and 
sit in chairs the rest of the time. 

But this has not had much effect upon the 
character of our appetite. We are often 
hungry for the kind of food that would only 
suit a body under constant exercise. There 
are those among us, too, who are inclined 
to eat more than is good for them — to be 
candid — who like to stuff themselves. Now 
stuffing was a normal habit to our ances- 
tors. They had to take their food when 
they could get it and trust God for the next 
meal. And it was easy for them to steal 
away into some quiet retreat and sleep un- 
disturbed until the stomach had done the 
main part of its duty. The digestive organs, 
accustomed to coarse work and violent 
exercise, were able to cope with the situation. 
Ours are not. Fine head-work and coarse 
stomach-work do not go naturally together. 
Here again we meet with a special problem. 

Much scientific effort has been expended 



64 The Efficient Life 

of late to discover experimentally what kinds 
of food are best adapted to modern con- 
ditions. The results of these experiments 
are certainly interesting and suggestive; but 
whether or not they have proved all that is 
maintained for them is open to question. 

One thing, however, they have made 
perfectly clear, and that is that the majority 
of us eat a much larger quantity of meat than 
we need — more, indeed, than we can get 
any possible good from. Meat twice a day 
is enough for anybody, and for most of us 
once a day would be better yet. There 
is no doubt, too, that such foods as grains, 
nuts, fruits, vegetables, should take a much 
more prominent place in our diet than they 
do. Beyond that, it would be dangerous to 
preach as yet. 

Xo man knoT^^s exactly what kind of food 
or how much food another man needs un- 
less he is personally well informed about 
his case — and he may not know even then. 
A man's own particular make-up is the 
prime factor in deciding questions of meat 
and drink. But there are several ways in 
which one can tell pretty accurately whether 



Meat, Drink, and the Table 65 

he is getting the most out of his food or not. 
The first of these is through keeping track 
of his weight. Everybody ought to know 
what his own normal weight is — the weight 
at which he accomplishes the most and feels 
the best. The averages given in a life 
insurance table will serve in a rough way, 
but not so well as a table of one's own 
variations. It often happens that the opti- 
mum weight for a particular individual 
differs considerably from the general aver- 
age. 

By keeping track of the weight from week 
to week and comparing it with the standard, 
every alteration of the general bodily con- 
dition can be discovered and attended to. 
The time will come when every up-to-date 
bathroom will be equipped with its pair of 
scales. 

Another way of discovering a defective 
condition of the digestive organs is to thump 
the pit of the stomach with the finger. If 
it makes you wince and double up, it shows 
that something is wrong. 

The presence of gas in the stomach is 
also a sign of faulty digestion. It means 



66 The Efficient Life 

that there is fermentation going on, that the 
process of breaking down and assimilating 
the foods is imperfect. 

Something, too, is indicated by one's 
state of mind. If you have a feeHng of 
depression and low spirits without any ap- 
parent cause, it is time to inquire into the 
food supply and what the body is doing 
with it. 

A good digestion is a thing to take pride in. 
It ought to be cherished most conscien- 
tiously. The trouble with many of us is 
that just so long as we are not disturbed by 
what goes on in our alimentary tract, we 
abuse it outrageously. There w^ill be a 
price to pay for this some time. The worm 
turns; and so does the stomach. 

There are a few plain facts about how 
and when to eat which it would be worth a 
man's while to keep in mind, no matter how 
well he may feel. 

If you are in a hurry, eat lightly. There 
is no virtue in gulping down a large meal just 
because it is meal-time. While the mind is 
actively engaged in the details and responsi- 
bilities of business, the digestive apparatus 



Meat, Drink, and the Table 67 

is in no condition to undertake heavy work. 
The blood supply is drained off elsewhere, 
giving all the contribution it can to the 
brain; and if a quantity of food is taken 
in, it simply remains undigested in the 
stomach. 

Worry, hurry, unsettled mind, low spirits, 
all tend to delay or to stop the activities of 
the alimentary canal. 

This has been neatly shown by an X-ray 
experiment upon the digestion of a cat. A 
certain amount of subnitrate of bismuth 
was introduced into its stomach before 
feeding. This substance is impervious to 
the X-rays, but is harmless to the organism. 
Hence it was possible to watch the action 
of the stomach while the digestion of food 
went on there. As long as the animal was 
kept nervous and excited, all the movements 
necessary to digestion were stopped. 

Students who go at hard head-work 
immediately after meals often suffer from 
indigestion. So do letter carriers and other 
people whose meals are followed by pro- 
longed physical exertion. Indeed, any kind 
of effort which forces the blood-flow away 



68 The Efficient Life 

from the aHmentary region is injurious after 
heavy eating. 

On this account it is worth a very special 
effort on the part of every man to compass 
one meal each day which shall be leisurely, 
uninterrupted, and cheerful. The argu- 
ments for this are not based on digestion 
only; they have to do with the mental health 
of the individual, and with the welfare of the 
family as an institution. 

The dinner table is the centre of the family 
life, and the family is the social unit. The 
common meal draws all its members 
together under informal and famihar con- 
ditions, where mutual interests and com- 
panionship are especially promoted. Even 
if a man has no home of his own, it is his 
business to make himself a member of some 
household and to have a share in its life. 

An energetic effort to leave one's work and 
responsibility behind, in the office or at the 
counter, a leisurely bath and a change of 
clothes, the deliberate resolution to be agree- 
able and to make the meal a pleasure for all 
concerned, even though it costs an effort — 
this is not only good for the digestion and 



Meat, Drink, and the Table 69 

the whole state of the body, but it also 
serves a social purpose of the greatest 
importance. 

It is the fashion in some quarters to sniff 
at the pleasures of the table as if they were 
essentially of a rather inferior character. 
Perhaps they do not belong in the loftiest 
rank, but they are perfectly normal, and 
more than that, they afford a natural med- 
ium for the real interchange of ideas — ^for 
real reciprocity. One cannot afford to 
neglect this fact. 

The after-dinner state of mind exists only 
after dinner. 



THE BUSINESS OF 
DIGESTION 



CHAPTER VIII 

npHE body is like a stove. If you put the 
'^ wrong kind of fuel into a stove, you 
cannot get good results out of it. A hard- 
coal stove will not get along well on soft 
coal. It will suffer from indigestion. It 
must be thoroughly cleaned out, too, at 
certain times, or its works get clogged and 
there is trouble of another sort. Right 
coaling and right cleaning — those are im- 
portant considerations if the stove is to 
carry on its legitimate business. 

No man can be useful or efficient in the 
world without proper food and without 
giving attention to the disposal of waste. 
Nearly all the diseases and most of the pains 
people have are related, first or last, to dis- 
turbances of nutrition. 

It pays a man to know something about 
the way his stove works and how to give it 
the best chance. 

As for coaling, then — What and how 
ought a man to eat.^ The first important 
problem here has to do with the mouth and 

73 



74 The Efficient Life 

its work — with mastication. No one has 
ever made a hard-and-fast rule for that 
which is of any practical value. If food is 
not chewed enough, there is a bad time due. 
If it is chewed too much, there is waste: 
patience and energy are thrown away. So 
much is obvious. 

Now the purpose of mastication is two- 
fold; first, to break up the food so that the 
digestive juices can get at it readily; and sec- 
ondly, to mix it with the saliva of the mouth. 

Food that is bolted is likely to ferment in 
the stomach before the gastric fluids can 
work their way into it. Food that is not 
well mixed with saliva is hard to digest, for 
saliva is an alkaline substance and stimulates 
the flow of the acid stomach juices. It is 
intended to help them in the despatch of 
their work. 

Many people get into the habit of dosing 
themselves with a ''digestive" or some other 
kind of medicine in order to stimulate the 
secretion of the gastric juice. This is a 
dangerous habit. If the same effect can be 
obtained through natural means, it is better 
from every point of view. The natural 



The Business of Digestion 75 

remedy for faulty digestion is often simply 
to chew the food more slowly. 

This increases the amount of saliva that 
mixes with it. This is not a picturesque nor 
exciting method of treatment, perhaps, but 
it often brings the right results. 

Eating a dry cracker twenty minutes 
before meals may be still more efficacious. 
No water should be taken with it and the 
cracker should be thoroughly chewed. 
The saliva that gets into the stomach by this 
means starts the gastric juices flowing, and 
by the time the meal itself arrives, the 
stomach is able to cope with it. 

Nobody has escaped being informed by 
some earnest friend that it is injurious to 
take water with meals. The ''Health 
Hints'' of the average newspaper are fertile 
with this sort of advice. There is really a 
sound reason at the basis of it, but it is 
carried too far. The trouble with the 
majority of people is that they drink water 
simply to wash down their solid food. 
This is a thoroughly bad habit. It cuts off 
the secretion of saliva; the stomach juices 
lack their normal stimulus. 



76 The Efficient Life 

Further than this, if the water is cold it 
puts a temporary injunction on the work of 
the ahmentary canaL The stomach is 
unable to carry on business again until the 
regulation temperature has been restored » 
And this takes time. 

The moderate use of water or other liquids 
at meals does no harm, if a man takes them 
not as a wash but as a drink. 

There are plenty of other causes for 
indigestion besides slipshod mastication. 
A faulty circulation of blood through the 
abdomen is one. This may be due to 
interference either from within or from 
without. 

Tight clothes are the commonest form of 
outside interference. Not only is the blood 
circulation hurt by them, but the free action 
of the great diaphragm muscle beneath the 
lungs, one of whose duties is to keep the walls 
of the stomach kneading and churning the 
food contents, is hampered. Military coats, 
stays, tight belts — anything that really binds 
the body — are sure to be harmfuL 

It is hard to get people, particularly 
women, to admit that their clothes are too 



The Business of Digestion 77 

tight. A pressure mark left on the skin 
after undressing is an infalKble sign. 

Internal interference with the circulation 
is most often due to some trouble with the 
liver. Anything which stops the free flow 
of blood through this organ dams it back 
into the region of the stomach and produces 
congestion there, A bad liver circulation 
frequently comes from the use of liquors, 
particularly from drinking on an empty 
stomach. If a man is going to drink liquor 
at all he should do so only when he eats 
The evil effects and the morbid appetite 
developed by drinking occur largely in 
connection with indulgence between meals. 

In a great many cases the cause of diges- 
tive troubles is to be found in a bad carriage 
of the body: neck forward, ribs depressed, 
abdomen protuberant — ^what has been termed 
the *' gorilla'' position. This allows a slight 
displacement of all the important organs of 
the abdominal cavity; and such a displace- 
ment, along with the reduced power of the 
heart and diaphragm, may work great harm. 
The matter of right carriage has already 
been discussed. The first step in getting 



78 The Efficient Life 

the digestion into better shape is often the 
correction of this easy but villainous habit 
of bad posture. 

Another great aid is deep breathing. 
After breakfast and after luncheon, as you 
are walking on the street, breathe just as 
deeply as you can ten times in succession. 
Then breathe normally for a minute. Then 
take ten more deep breaths. Do this four 
or five times the first day and increase it by 
one round every day until you are taking 
from three to four hundred deep breaths 
daily as a regular habit. This consumes 
no time. You do it while you are walking 
on the street. It improves the action of 
the diaphragm. It stimulates the circula- 
tion of the blood in the head. It increases 
the activity of the intestinal movements. It 
costs no money. 

Right there, perhaps, lies the chief diffi- 
culty with it. If each breath cost a man a 
cent, a great many more men would culti- 
vate the habit. 

Most of us take but little exercise. We 
sit in chairs and work with our heads. 
Nature intended our bodies to do muscular 



The Business of Digestion 79 

work. When she did that job, she did not 
look ahead to the complex and artificial 
conditions of modern city life. But it is 
clear that one of the best methods we have 
of raising the efficiency of the bodily func- 
tions is exercise. It is especially helpful to 
imperfect digestion. 

If a man will go to a gymnasium, or swim, 
or bowl, or box, or play golf, or do anything 
else that involves a good deal of exertion 
for the big muscles of the body, the whole 
system will respond energetically. The di- 
gestive organs will be among the first to 
feel the effect of the new life. 

But we must make a clear distinction 
between what is called '"general exercise'' 
and other forms. A man can work his hand 
or his throat or the muscles of his face most 
conscientiously without getting any benefit 
so far as his general health is concerned. 
The value of exercise is in proportion to the 
total amount of work done. The larger the 
muscles, the more work they can do. It is 
chiefly through using the muscles of the legs 
and trunk that results for the system as a 
whole may be secured. 



8o The EfRcient Life 

Take big movements of the big muscles. 

Swinging a pair of Kght Indian clubs may 
be interesting and pretty, but it does not 
have much to do with the health. Twisting 
the trunk from side to side, bending forward 
the back, are types of exercise that bring 
results. The majority of popular sports 
call for such movements as these. It is the 
big movements that count. 



WASTE 



CHAPTER IX 

J NDIGESTION, nervous exhaustion, 
constipation — three of Nature's star 
plays when she makes up her mind to get 
quits with youc You cannot cheat her 
eithero She plays the game for all it is 
worth. 

Constipation is ten times more prevalent 
than are nervous disorders. I believe that 
more of the chronically sick are so because of 
this than for any other reason. It is 
peculiarly the penalty of city life, the price 
we pay for living under artificial conditions. 

Any number of special causes may lie 
at the root of constipation, but the com- 
monest is certainly physical inactivity — the 
life of the office chair and the rapid 
transit. The digestive organs were not 
planned with that in viewc They are not 
self-sufficient. They need to be helped 
along in their work by the rest of the body. 

Vigorous physical exertion stimulates 
them. The jar of hard walking or running, 
the stretch and twist of climbing, and swim- 

83 



84 The Efficient Life 

ming and heavy muscular work — all these 
serve to keep the digestive tract in constant 
activity. In the daily programme of most of 
us there is nothing to supply this need. 
Therefore the passage of food through the in- 
testines tends to grow sluggish, and the colon 
and rectum are in danger of getting clogged. 

That is one cause for constipation. An- 
other lies in the kind of food we eat. We 
take so much trouble nowadays to have it 
nourishing, digestible and perfectly prepared 
that we often fail to give the stomach and 
intestines enough work to do. There is not 
enough bulk in the food. The walls of the 
intestines cannot get a good grip on it. 

Food that is ''predigested'' is worse yet 
for a healthy man. It leaves practically no 
responsibility for the alimentary tract; and 
the alimentary tract needs responsibility if 
it is to keep in order. Idleness leads 
directly to incompetency. The system for- 
gets how to take care of a square rneal. 
'* Concentrated'' foods are worst of all. 
Eat mince pie, sauerkraut, and rarebit occa- 
sionally if you will, but give a wide berth to 
the steady use of concentrated foods. They 



Waste 85 

have a place in the world, but it is not that 
of a regular diet. 

The trouble with most of the health-foods, 
whose boom days seem to be just passing 
the meridian, is that they are found wanting 
in two important respects. They have not 
enough bulk, and they lack grit; that is, 
there is nothing in them to irritate and 
stimulate the intestine- walls. The intes- 
tines need stimulation from within as well 
as from without. The reason why jSgs, 
raisins, bran-crackers, are good for con- 
stipation is because they provide just this. 

I know two university students who tried 
the experiment of making their whole diet 
consist of predigested foods. They were 
preparing for final examinations and wished 
to secure the maximum nourishment with 
the least expenditure of nervous force. The 
experiment was decidedly successful, except 
for the fact that after the six weeks of in- 
tense labour their digestive organs were in 
such a state of inefficiency from prolonged 
lack of use that it took them months to get 
back to normal working conditions. 

Then there is the practice of using laxa- 



86 The Efficient Life 

tives. It lies back of thousands of chronic 
cases of constipation. A man who uses a 
laxative to help him out of an inconvenience 
is not hitting at the root of the difficulty at 
all. The conditions that gave rise to it 
probably remain, and they will make trouble 
again. In a little while the system gets to 
rely on the laxative ; then the habit becomes 
a necessity. The doses have to be made 
larger and larger, while their effects become 
less and less all the time. 

No laxative — not even an enema — ^will 
work permanently. They go round in a 
vicious circle. They all leave their victim 
worse off than when he began. They 
make his trouble chronic. They never 
touch the real cause. 

One man out of every ten is said to be a 
slave of the laxative habit. 

Another sure method of achieving con* 
stipation is that of delaying to answer the 
calls of the system when they come. It is 
not perfectly easy, perhaps, to attend to the 
matter when the first messages from the 
rectum arrive. It is easier to put it off. It 
continues to be easier. 



Waste 87 

But after a while the nerves get tired of 
their ineffectual efforts and cease to prod 
the brain any longer. Consequently, when 
a convenient opportunity finally comes, 
there is nothing to remind one of the need. 
A delay habit like this leads to the most 
serious kinds of results. If a man kept a 
regular time each day for attending to the 
business of disposing of the waste-products 
of his body, the system would soon adjust 
itself and be ready to respond at the right 
moment. Regularity in this matter is essen- 
tial to healthy living. 

Often enough, though, the root of the 
difficulty lies not so much in bad habits of 
the body as in bad habits of mind. The 
way in which a man looks at himself and at 
the w^orld has a lot to do with what goes on 
in his digestive tract. No part of the body 
except the muscular system is so much 
affected by states of mind as the digestive 
and excretory organs. Worry and nervous- 
ness wreck digestion. Discouragement and 
low spirits lead the straight road to 
constipation. 

A man's mind may be constipated before 



88 The Efficient Life 

his body. Melancholy tends toward con- 
stipation and constipation tends toward 
melancholy. It is a merry-go-round draped 
in black. 

Most people have the idea that con- 
stipation means infrequency of bowel move- 
ment. That is merely a symptom. Many 
men suffer from constipation w^ho have 
passages with perfect regularity. Constipa- 
tion is the condition which results from 
incomplete passages. It is due to the 
presence of waste-products in the alimentary 
canal. If there is a constant remainder 
there, the body keeps absorbing some of the 
poisons of decay from it and dumping them 
into the circulation. The system is poison- 
ing itself, slowly but surely. All the symp- 
toms show this. 

A sense of fulness and pressure in the 
abdomen is one of them. The presence 
of gas — a fermentation sign — is another. 
There is likely to be a persistent, nagging 
headache — the kind that cannot be shaken 
off. The breath is bad, and a man feels 
in chronic low spirits, down in the mouth. 
There is a definite lessening of mental 



Waste 89 

power; the mind works at slug-pace and 
without any of its habitual energy. It takes 
a big effort to set one's self at work and to 
accomplish things. Besides this, the com- 
plexion is likely to be poor, the skin muddy 
and unhealthy looking. These symptoms 
are all due to the same cause: a body 
saturated with waste product, with poisons, 
which ought to have been gotten rid of. It 
is a villainous condition. 

But there is no need of its being per- 
manent. 



THE ATTACK ON CONSTI- 
PATION 



CHAPTER X 

T^HE first step in the cure of constipation 
is to get into the right frame of mind. 
That may be easier said than done. Never- 
theless, a cheerful and optimistic temper is 
the most efficacious of all remedies. ^^ Be- 
lieve and thou shalt be saved/^ 

The digestive tract is remarkably sus- 
ceptible to faith. People who suffer from 
constipation are often remarkably destitute 
of it. They prefer to believe the worst 
about themselves. They even seem to get 
a morbid satisfaction out of it. No matter 
how encouraging has been the outcome in 
other cases,, they are sure there is no hope 
for themselves; that they are incurable. 

An energetic conviction that the trouble 
can and will be cured counts tremendously 
in curing it. That is why Christian Science 
and other forms of mental healing often work 
such admirable results when applied to 
chronic digestion troubles. 

The difficulty lies in the fact that a man 
cannot always control his mental attitude 



94 The Efficient Life 

simply by setting out to do so. He can say 
over to himself, ''I will be optimistic/' 
several hundred times a day and yet remain 
most sade He needs specific things to do; 
he needs to get at his problem in a concrete 
way. 

There are a few purely practical sugges- 
tions that ought to fit in at this juncture. 
I have known a great number of people who 
have found help in taking a glass of cold 
water both upon rising and upon retiring. 
The simplicity of this treatment is its only 
fault. 

If you have been paying very conscientious 
attention to your diet in the hope of knock- 
ing out the trouble that way — worry less and 
eat more. Stop thinking about it. Give 
your conscience a vacation. Your char- 
acter will not suffer. 

See to it that there is bulk in your food, 
something for your intestines really to get 
hold of and work on. Food which contains 
cellulose or other mechanically irritating 
substances is excellent. Bran biscuits at 
night are often useful in this way. 

Exercise, again, is a most important form 



The Attack on Constipation 95 

of treatment. The reason is the same as 
in other cases; it is an attempt to get back 
some of those conditions under which the 
body developed its functions. 

Many of the forms of exercise prescribed 
for the cure of constipation are more drama- 
tic than practical — not because they would 
not help if followed, but because no one will 
follow them. To this class belongs the 
following: Lie flat on the back in bed and 
work the head of a sixteen pound iron ball 
along the course of the colon, the walls of 
the abdomen to be completely relaxed, the 
movement to be made slowly, and a cheerful 
temper to be preserved throughout. The- 
oretically excellent. 

Far more practical is a ride upon a hard 
trotting horse. This is effective because 
the continuous jarring of the body helps 
along the w^ork of the intestinal walls. The 
easier the horse, the less his therapeutic 
value. 

Rapid walking is commonly one of the 
effective means. This gives the same jar- 
ring motion to the abdomen. If the speed 
is as great as possible, there is a slight 



96 The EfScicnt Life 

twisting of the hips with each step which 
keeps the abdominal organs in constant 
motion. And since fast walking is a form 
of energetic exercise, calling into play 
large groups of muscles in rapid alternation, 
it greatly increases the movement of the 
diaphragm. We have already spoken of 
the important part played by the diaphragm 
in the woyk of the digestive tract. 

Running, deep breathing, twisting and 
bending of the trunk, and the majority of 
general gymnasium exercises, are all among 
the normal remedies. 

Such suggestions as these do not strike 
as deeply as the mental attitude, but they 
represent the concrete side of the proposi- 
tion. They are practical. They give a 
handle to get hold of — something that a 
man can set himself doing; and if he goes 
at it in earnest and with the intention of 
playing the game for all it is worth, the 
right mental attitude is pretty sure to come 
too. 

I remember most vividly a case that 
came under my direction a few years ago. It 
was a professional man of middle age. 



The Attack on Constipation 97 

conscientious, a hard worker, very much 
in earnest. It was easiest for him to look 
on the dark side of things, and he worried 
constantly about his own physical condition 
— which, for that matter, was in a pretty bad 
way. Heredity, he believed, was the source 
of his trouble; and having found this explan- 
ation he was convinced that nothing could be 
done for him, that his case was hopeless. 

He listened indulgently to stories about 
other people who had been cured; but he 
was chiefly interested in telling about him- 
self — the harsh measures he had submitted 
to; the enormous drug doses he had taken 
— all in vain. This he related with a sort 
of martyr pride. It was evident that the 
role of victim was not without its com- 
pensations. 

The first advice he got was to take deep 
breathing exercises, lying on the floor of his 
bedroom. He had to take these in a 
leisurely manner, with intervals between 
each round of five deep breaths ; and it was 
not until later that arm and leg movements 
were added. Any heavy exercise brought 
on dizziness. 



98 The Efficient Life 

Twice a week he took a ride on a hard 
trotting horse. Then I set him to running, 
first a few yards at a jog pace and then an 
interval of walking, then a little more run- 
ning. I used to watch him sometimes 
through a hole in the fence as he conscien- 
tiously went the rounds of the track, and I 
shall never forget the expression on his face. 
He w^anted to be bored, but he knew that 
would be wrong — contrary to directions. 
So he bravely jogged along and succeeded 
in taking it something in the spirit in which 
a man takes a bad joke that he know^s he is 
expected to laugh at. 

Much the hardest thing to get at in that 
case was the mental condition. I knew 
that he could not be cured until that w^as 
changed somehow. Finally I directed him 
to tell a funny story at each meal of the day, 
with an extra two at dinner. That was 
because it was entirely impossible for him 
to control his own state of mind by will- 
power. He needed a handle — some objec- 
tive w^ay of getting at it. He rebelled 
violently at the new orders, but finally con- 
sented to make the attempt. 



The Attack on Constipation 99 

It was such a terrible undertaking for him 
that for the first few days he could not open 
his mouth. He forgot his stories completely. 
Then I made him write them down on a 
piece of paper and keep them in his lap 
for reference. When a pause in the con- 
versation arrived he would become restless, 
look anxiously about, glance at his lap, 
summon up his courage, clear his throat and 
begin. The prescription was a bitter one 
for him; but he had promised to make the 
attempt, and before a week was out, the 
humour of the situation struck him, and he 
began to enjoy the fun. After that his 
recovery was sure. 

Before six weeks had passed there had 
taken place such a change in his character 
that all his acquaintances noticed it. He 
had been suffering from constipation for 
years. He grew cheerful, light-hearted and 
approachable. The whole current of his 
life had turned in a different direction. 

From a case like that much may be 
learned. 



FATIGUE 



CHAPTER XI 

npHAT great Italian physiologist, Angelo 
Mosso, has given an account in his 
book on "Fatigue'' of the arrival of flocks 
of quails on the seacoast of Italy on their 
northward migration from Africa. The 
distance across the Mediterranean is three 
hundred miles or more, and the bird covers 
this distance in less than nine hours, flying 
at the rate of eighteen or nineteen yards 
per second. 

^^Tiien the quail sights land its strength is 
almost exhausted. It seems to have lost the 
power of recognising objects, even though 
its eyes are wide open. Every year vast 
numbers of birds dash themselves to death 
against trees, telegraph poles, and houses 
on the shore. 

Those that have met with no accident lie 
motionless on the edge of the beach for 
some moments as though stunned. They 
seem to have become incapable of fear, and 
sometimes even let themselves be caught by 
hand without trying to get away. When 

103 



I04 The Efficient Life 

they finally awaken to their exposed position, 
they pick themselves up suddenly and run 
for a hiding place. But they do not fly. 
It is days before they will use their wings 
again. 

We can see effects of a somewhat similar 
kind in ourselves when we are exhausted. 
I remember a certain ten-mile bicycle race 
in which I was a contestant. I had 
fastened my watch to the handle bars in 
such a way that I could keep my eyes on it 
during the race. Before I had finished the 
fifth mile, I found that it was impossible for 
me to read the watch-hands. I saw them 
plainly enough, and after the race was over 
I could recollect how they had stood at 
certain points in the course; but at the 
time I had lost all faculty of getting any 
meaning out of them. 

An incident of this kind suggests how 
deep the effects of fatigue strike in. It is 
easy to show by experiment that fatigue 
slows down the circulation, dulls the nerves, 
lessens the secretion of the glands, decreases 
the power of digestion, reduces the ability 
of the system to recover from shock or 



Fatigue 105 

injury, and makes the body peculiarly 
liable to disease. 

In other words, fatigue lowers all the 
faculties of the body. The effects on the 
other parts of a man are just as important. 
It puts a chasm between seeing and acting; 
it makes a break, somehow, between the 
messages that come in to the brain from the 
outside world and the messages that go out. 
It destroys will-power. In every direction 
it decreases efficiency, forcing the personality 
down to a lower level. 

Fatigue is a destructive agent like sickness 
and death. It is a condition which in the 
nature of things we cannot avoid; but it is 
important for us to know what it is and how 
to deal with it if we want to keep out of 
costly blunders. 

When we are tired out, we are not our- 
selves. A part of us has temporarily gone 
out of existence. What remains is some- 
thing that belongs to a more primitive state 
of civilisation. 

Our personalities are built up in strata, 
one layer added to another. At the bottom 
lie the savage virtues and vices of our 



io6 The Efficient Life 

remote ancestors. The code of morals of 
cHff-dwellers and hunting tribes still holds 
there. At the top lie the higher attainments 
of an advanced society — the things that have 
taken hundreds of centuries to acquire. In 
men, patience is one of these; modesty is 
another; chastity, and a fine sense of justice 
and personal obligation belong in the list too. 

Now when fatigue begins to attack the 
personality, it naturally undermines these 
latest strata first. When a man is exhausted 
he finds it difficult to be patient. That is 
not his fault. It is because fatigue has 
forced him back a few hundred generations. 
His self-control is at a low ebb. The small- 
est annoyances are enough to make him 
lose his temper. 

The same holds true of all the recent 
character acquisitions. Many temptations 
are more violent and harder to resist when 
a man is fatigued. His moral sense is 
dulled. He loses the vividness of his dis- 
tinctions between right and wrong, honesty 
and dishonesty. 

We degenerate from the top down. The 
last thing acquired is the first lost. 



Fatigue 107 

Therefore, bodily vigour is a moral agent. 
It enables us to live on higher levels, to keep 
up to the top of our achievement. We can 
not afford to lose grip on ourselves. 

The only thing to do with fatigue, then, 
is to get rid of it as soon as possible. As^ 
long as it is with us we ought to realise that 
we are not our normal selves and to act in 
accordance. Important questions must not 
be decided then. It is a bad time to make 
plans for the future. A man has lost his 
faculty of seeing straight. 

It is often said that the best way of getting 
rid of fatigue is a change of occupation. 
This is usually true, but not always. A 
moderate degree of muscular fatigue will 
not keep a man from taking up something 
which will use his brain; and while his 
brain works, his muscles will rest. But 
there is a degree of muscular fatigue which 
makes head-work impossible. 

The converse of this is also true. If a 
man's brain is used up, hard exercise is 
nothing but a sheer drain upon the system, 
not in any sense a form of rest. The central 
battery has run down. The energy supply 



io8 The Efficient Life 

is exhausted. To force anything more out 
of it is to kill the goose that laid the golden 
eggs. 

Unfortunately, a good many men have 
the conviction that they must keep exerting 
themselves all the time. They call every 
moment wasted which is not spent in 
activity of some kind, either physical or 
mental. Such men are taking the quickest 
means to burn themselves out. You cannot 
live well and keep happy under a constant 
and tyrannical sense of effort. There must 
be times of play, times to let up the tension, 
and to do easy and natural things which 
do not require conscious and exact attention. 

Horace Bushnell, the great Connecticut 
minister, recognised this when he said, 
^' Let's go sin awhile.'' Sinning has the 
advantage of being easy, and there are times 
when the easy thing is the right thing. A 
man who takes no time off for one kind of 
play or another, but who keeps the anxious, 
conscientious look on his face day in and 
day out, may be on the road to heaven, but 
he will find that the sanitarium is a way- 
station. 



Fatigue 109 

Each man has his own special manner of 
reacting under fatigue — ^what physiologists 
call his '* fatigue-curve/' One works along 
steadily and evenly right through the day 
without any alternation in his efficiency 
worth recording, except that it shades off 
gradually during the last hour or two. 
Another man is unusually slow in getting 
warmed up to work, but once in action he 
maintains a higher level of productivity 
than the first man; and he may be able to 
hold the pace longer besides. A nervous 
man can usually throw himself with great 
vigour into his work. He is under way in a 
minute and sweeps quickly ahead of all 
competitors. But the chances are that his 
energy will not hold out long. He taps it 
too fast. After two hours, or less, he is 
likely to feel jaded and tired. His head 
needs a rest before he can put it to work 
again. 

Each of these types is familiar, and there 
are as many variations as there are indi- 
viduals. Yet men rarely take this into 
consideration when blocking out their day. 

It is useless for the nervous, high-strung. 



no The Efficient Life 

quickly-fatigued man to try to live by the 
same programme as his phlegmatic, even- 
tempered neighbour. The conditions under 
which the two men produce the best results 
are not identical. The man who cannot 
work at his best until after a long period of 
warming up, ought to stick to his job, when 
once he has gotten at it, as long as he. can 
keep up to the high-grade level. That is 
the only real economy for him. On the 
other hand, the man who accomplishes 
most when he works by spurts and takes 
intervals of play between times, ought not 
to feel that he is doing wrong when he gives 
up imitating the steady workman. System 
and continuous driving decrease, not in- 
crease, his efficiency. Both men can do 
high-grade work, but not under the same 
conditions. 

Every man ought to discover the special 
conditions of his own best work and to try 
to make such conditions for himself, in so 
far as he can. Otherwise there is a waste 
somewhere. Nothing is gained and much 
is lost through trying to run everybody 
through the same mould. 



Fatigue 1 1 1 

I have spoken of fatigue as one of the 
destructive agents. That does not mean 
that there is any harm in being thoroughly 
tired at night after the day's work, if only 
a man knows how to look out for himself. 
Other things being equal, the system will 
soon repair the waste, and by another day 
the man will be ready for energetic work again. 

The time when fatigue becomes a really 
dangerous agent of destruction is when a 
normal amount of rest does not do away 
with it — when it piles up day after day, so 
that a man comes from his work tired and 
goes to it equally tired. Such fatigue as this 
keeps him living on a low level of efficiency. 
He never gets up to his own possible best. 
This may be because he works too hard, 
but it is more likely to be because he does 
not know how to look out for himself. 

An athlete who is training for the two- 
mile run cannot cover the whole course 
every day. The physical cost of the exer- 
tion is so great that a single night is not 
enough to make good the waste. A man 
who is training for the fifty-yard dash can 
do several heats every day. 



112 The Efficient Life 

How much rest a man needs depends on 
the character of his work and on the per- 
sonal make-up of the man himself. 

Over-fatigue is fatigue that does not 
disappear before the next exertion. Over- 
fatigue piles up against the day of wratho 
This must be guarded against. 



SLEEP 



CHAPTER XII 

'^J'OT one of the fundamental questions 
about sleep has yet been answered. 
What really happens when we go to sleep ? 
What is it that sleeps ? What is the real 
distinction between sleeping and waking? 

We know little about the real nature of 
this every-day mystery. We have had to 
unlearn most of the older orthodox theories, 
and we have not yet found adequate ones 
of our own to take their place. 

We cannot say nowadays that ''sleep is 
fatigue of consciousness." That is mean- 
ingless. You might as well speak of the 
fatigue of a brook or of an electric current. 
We cannot even say that consciousness 
necessarily disappears during sleep. Cer- 
tainly the brain does not stop working then. 
It is still capable of carrying on all kinds of 
complicated processes — even solving math- 
emtical problems or composing poems. If 
this is unconsciousness, it is an odd varietv. 
And on yet lower levels it can dream. 

But if it is not the brain that sleeps, what 

115 



Ii6 The Efficient Life 

is it ? Certainly not the body. The body 
keeps working incessantly. Its activity is 
simply reduced to a somewhat lower leveL 
The heart beats more slowly, the blood 
pressure is lower, breathing is irregular and 
less frequent, the muscles are relaxed, the 
blood supply to the brain is diminished. 
But there is still work being done. 

Perhaps we should come nearest the 
truth if we said that whatever the Thing 
is that goes to sleep and wakes up again, it 
is never all asleep nor all awake. It is 
more or less both at once. 

We could illustrate what we mean by an 
upright scale like a barometer-back. When 
the indicator is near the top of the scale, the 
consciousness is most active, wide awake, 
alert to all impressions, able to give attention 
without effort. As the marker sinks and 
sinks on the scale, we become gradually 
less and less aware of our surroundings, 
our attention flags, we cannot concentrate 
our minds; we are at the mercy of any 
ideas that drift into our consciousness. 
This is the condition of reverie. 

Then comes a point where we fail to get 



Sleep 117 

sense impressions from the outside world. 
The light seems to grow remote; we do not 
feel our clothes nor the chair or bed on which 
we are resting. Our thoughts become less 
connected and more indistinct, and in a 
few more minutes we have sunk into the 
condition we call sleep. But we have not 
crossed any sharp dividing line. We have 
dropped there by easy stages. Even now 
our brain may keep working indistinctly, 
and as the indicator rises on the scale, we 
begin to dream and perhaps may even hold 
conversations aloud with real people in the 
real world. 

Sleep, then, is a merely relative condition, 
not sharply cut off and separated from wak- 
ing life, any more than the ebb-tide on the 
seashore is distinct in its nature from the 
high-tide. They are different stages in the 
same phenomenon. 

Looking at the matter in this way clears 
up a number of misleading ideas. One of 
them is that during waking hours we tear 
down and during sleeping hours we build 
up. This is true in part. But as a matter 
of fact, we are tearing down both day and 



ii8 The Efficient Life 

night, and we are always building up. The 
work of destruction and the work of repair 
go on side by side. 

The difference is that we destroy faster 
during the day than w^e can build up. The 
spending gets ahead of the income. Where- 
as at night, when the activity of the body is 
less, when its outgo is cut down, the work 
of repair has a chance to get ahead. It is 
simply a change of ratio. 

We are just beginning to discover how 
much really goes on in the mind during 
sleep. Sleep is not only the time for 
physical growth, but I am inclined to think 
that it is equally the time for mental growth 
—the time when the personality is formed ; 
that impressions which have been gained 
during the day are worked over new and are 
made into a part of the sum total : that new 
resolutions which we have taken become 
rooted and strengthened then, new ideas 
that we have hit upon are digested and given 
their place in the memory. It seems to be 
a time when the mind sorts over its experi- 
ences and casts up accounts. 

This is true in a special sense of the 



Sleep 119 

impressions and impulses that come to us just 
as we are on the verge of sleep. This is the 
moment of all moments when we are most 
susceptible to psychic suggestion. It is 
almost like the state of the hypnotic sub- 
ject, when every command is put into ex- 
ecution. A man who is ambitious for himself 
will take advantage of the opportunity this 
offers; and when he goes to sleep he will 
make sure that the thoughts admitted into 
his mind are strong and healthy thoughts — 
thoughts of joy, of success and accomplish- 
ment. 

This is not romance. It is certain fact 
that a man can make suggestions to him- 
self at this time, and that there will be a 
positive effect for good upon the spirit and 
efficiency of his life. Character is formed 
more during the rest that follows work than 
during the work itself. 

The benefit a man gets from sleep does 
not seem to be in proportion to its length. 
Five minutes of sleep in the middle of the 
day will often give a most surprising brace- 
up to the system. Something happens 
then — no one can say just what — but there 



I20 The Efficient Life 

is some readjustment, some new coordina- 
tion, which may bring an entirely fresh vim 
and push to a man, enabhng him to make 
the attack on his work with redoubled vigour. 
This, while hard to explain, is a matter of 
common experience. 

Dr. Morse, the great geographer, had an 
original way of taking advantage of a 
moment's sleep, and of doing it in such a 
manner that he did not lose time from his 
work. When the sleepy feeling came over 
him as he worked late at his desk, he would 
place his wife's darner in one of his hands 
and hold it between his knees, resting his 
elbow on his knees. Then he would yield 
to the impulse and close his eyes. But as 
soon as he really fell asleep, his hand would 
relax; and the sound of the wooden egg 
falling to the floor would waken him. 
Strangely enough, the second of sleep that 
he had thus secured would be enough to let 
him work on for another period with new 
energy. Then he would go through the 
same process again. 

My father had such control of the mech- 
anism of sleep that often he would take 



Sleep 121 

a five minutes' nap just before going upon 
the platform to deliver an important ad- 
dress. It gave him new strength and new 
grip for the effort. How he managed to 
do it, he was not able to explain himself. 

Not many men, however, can hope to gain 
such a degree of control of sleep. For most 
of us it is still a difficult thing to get to sleep 
after a hard and exhausting day of head- 
work. Intellectual excitement fatigues us, 
but it does not make us sleepy. Instead, 
the more we work our heads the harder it is 
for us to sleep. The questions that have 
absorbed us during the day have a vicious 
way of cropping up in our minds again, do 
what we will to drive them out. We are 
fatigued through and through, but w^e are 
painfully wide awake. 

The problem that this situation presents 
has not been satisfactorily solved yet. But 
it must be solved sometime, for it is perfectly 
clear that civilisation is tending more and 
more to make head-work the controlling 
factor in life. It is my belief that one of the 
next great steps forward will be the gradual 
acquisition of sleep control, so that a man 



122 The Efficient Life 

can take a few minutes' rest whenever he 
wants it through the day. 

x4ls a general principle, it must be remem- 
bered that sleep is a non-strenuous thing. 
It must not be approached like an enemy to 
be conquered, but as a mistress to be wooed. 
One rarely succeeds by direct attack, but 
can usually succeed by indirect attack. 
Hence a period of leisure and quiet should 
with almost everyone precede the direct 
attempt to go to sleep. It is only under 
rare conditions that it is wise to go to bed 
directly from hard work, either physical 
or mental. An interval of quiet, of leisurely 
doing something without mental tension, 
is important. To let down the tension of 
the day, to become quiet in body and in 
mind, is the first essential step. 

One may by several means affect the body 
and thus aid in securing sleep. If the head 
is hot, cold water applied to the face, to 
the back of the neck, or even to the entire 
head continuously for a minute or two will 
frequently be of a real value. Of still 
greater utility is a warm bath. This re- 
laxes the entire body. The last part of the 



Sleep 123 

bath should be taken in water as hot as it 
is possible to have it, the person merely 
sitting in it. This will dilate all the blood 
vessels of the legs and thus tend to leave 
less blood in the head. Gentle rubbing of 
the skin of the body and of the legs tends to 
accomplish the same result. Some people 
get manifest advantage from a moderate 
outdoor walk; some people profit by taking 
twelve, fifteen, or twenty slow bendings of 
the legs. Rapid exercise, vv^hich materially 
increases the working of the heart, tends to 
keep one awake. 

There is a group of agencies which directs 
itself to the mind. I have already spoken 
of the need of relaxation. Many people 
can read themselves to sleep with some 
light novel or magazine. Others — partic- 
ularly those who suffer from eye strain, 
find themselves wider awake the more they 
read, even though the reading is of the 
lightest character. Of a similar nature is 
the playing of some musical instrument. 
This may be effective in keeping other 
people awake, but one must estimate things 
in terms of comparative value. 



124 The Efficient Life 

There is a large series of intellectual 
''stunts/' The utility of these I doubt. 
Their supposed efficacy lies in producing 
such mental fatigue that sleep comes on 
promptly. I refer to such efforts as the 
calculating of multiples to as great an extent 
as is possible to the individual. This in- 
volves, of course, a high degree of concentra- 
tion. Another form is to repeat the alphabet 
backward until one has so learned it, then 
to repeat it beginning with A and next tak- 
ing Z, then B and Y, and then so on until this 
becomes familiar — constantly seeking some 
rearrangement of letters, so that intense 
attention is involved. Thus persons have 
worked out extensive problems in geometry, 
by visualising the figures. 

Then again people may be sufficiently 
fatigued to go to sleep and they may be 
quiet, but their minds will not stop working 
over some special problems or worrying 
over real or imaginary difficulties. The 
time-honoured problem of counting imag- 
inary sheep jumping over an imaginary 
stone fence is familiar. One must imagine 
a large flock of sheep approaching a stone 



Sleep 125 

wall which has a gap in it. The wall is too 
high to jump over and there is only one 
selected gap. The gap must be so narrow 
that but one sheep can jump at a time. 
Then one must count this large flock of 
sheep one at a time until sleep supervenes 
and comes to the aid of the outraged sheep. 
I confess that personal experience with this 
particular test and others based upon the 
same principle has not been very favourable. 
My sheep seemed to be very athletic. They 
proceeded to find other places in the wall, 
over which they attempted to jump. I 
must shoo them back with great diligence 
at the same time that I am counting those 
that jump — and they never jump regularly 
— ^through the desired gap. My sheep are 
also obstreperous. Even after I have a 
large number securely over the fence and 
have counted them, I cannot then rest 
quietly, for these sheep in all their most 
earnest stupidity will endeavour to jump 
back. In attempting to go to sleep by this 
means, after ten or fifteen minutes I have 
found myself with rigid muscles and 
clenched hands, far wider awake than I was 



126 The Efficient Life 

at the beginning, in my futile endeavour to 
control the sheep of my imagination. How- 
ever, it works with some people. 

The fourth way which people take to 
secure sleep is by means of drugs. Certain 
drugs act promptly, and no immediate ill 
results are to be observed. I know of no 
drugs, however, that can be used continu- 
ously and that do not result in making the 
person dependent upon them, and which do 
not directly injure in some way the health 
or the stamina of the person taking them. 
My own conclusion is that drugs for the 
sake of sleep should never be taken except 
upon the advice and with the knowledge of 
a physician who is acquainted with the 
general conditions under which the person 
is livingo Every normal person ought to be 
able to command sleep by means of the 
ordinary conditions of good health and work 
as already described. When these con- 
ditions are beyond the control of the person 
he should then take counsel of a physician. 



STIMULANTS AND OTHER 
WHIPS 



CHAPTER XIII 

T TNDER the constant pressure of city 
^^ life a man is always on the lookout 
for short-cuts. He jumps at every possible 
chance of getting bigger returns with less 
outlay of time. He wants to put in every 
minute where it will count. When he takes 
time out for sleep, he wants to do it up in 
good shape. When he gets in his recreation, 
he wants to enjoy himself to the top limit. 
No matter what he is doing, he goes into 
it for all it is worth. 

This is why drugs and stimulants make 
such an appeal to the city man. They offer 
a short-cut method of getting results. They 
seem to give Nature a boost. 

A drug will often put us to sleep sooner 
than we can get there unaided. If we have 
the ''blues/' we can take a dose out of a 
bottle and soon feel happy and energetic 
again. With the help of a powder or two, 
we can knock out a headache and manage 
to keep at our business without any loss of 
time. If we have to work extra hours, we 

129 



130 The Efficient Life 

can keep ourselves awake and up to the 
game by the help of a stimulant. 

In other words, what drugs and stimulants 
seem to promise is increased efficiency with- 
out increased cost. If this were really the 
case, the use of drugs would be a habit to 
encourage. But there is a fallacy. 

Speaking physiologically, the purpose of 
a drug or a stimulant is to modify some 
function. It affects the work of an organ^ 
but it does not affect its structure — at least, 
that is not what it is taken for. It forces an 
organ to do work which it could not do of 
itself: it alters the output without altering 
the machinery — the natural capacity. 

When we put ourselves to sleep with a 
narcotic we are not teaching our nerves how 
to let go of excitement and how to regain 
their normal balance. They will not be in 
a position to do it any better another time 
than they were this time, and the chances 
are that we shall have to go to the drug 
again for help. When we bring about 
effects by artificial, instead of natural, means, 
the natural means grow more and more 
unreliable. The sensitiveness of the nerves 



Stimulants and Other Whips 131 

has been dulled by the powder, but the con- 
ditions that made the sensitiveness have not 
been touched at all. There is no cure in a 
drug — simply a temporary easing-up of 
the situation. 

A great many people do not take the 
trouble to think into the matter as far as 
that. All they want is to get the immediate 
result; and if this can be done through a 
drug, they make the venture. 

The use of patent powders for headache, 
sleeplessness, nervous exhaustion, and sim- 
ilar difficulties has enormously increased 
within the last few years. Taken in small 
doses and at rare intervals, these much- 
advertised remedies do not seem to be in- 
jurious. But a person who gets into the 
way of using them, soon gets out of the 
way of sticking to rare intervals. 

This is almost inevitable. As long as the 
powder will produce the result he wants, he 
is really forced to keep on using it; for the 
actual cause of the trouble has never been 
reached and it keeps making more trouble 
for him and demanding attention. But 
after the drug has been used long enough for 



132 The Efficient Life 

the system to become habituated to it, the 
eflPect grows less and less in proportion to 
the size of the dose» So the doses have to 
be increasedo 

There is no drug that can be taken into 
the system regularly without working harm. 
Every drug has a secondary effect as well 
as a primary one^ The immediate effect is 
all a man thinks of when he takes it; but 
the secondary effect follow^s just as 
inevitably. It is of an entirely different 
nature and it is always bad. 

For example, the secondary effect of 
most of the coal-tar headache powders is to 
reduce the number of red blood corpuscles 
whose business it is to carry oxygen to all 
parts of the bodyc It also has a dangerous 
effect on the heart, bringing in a sort of 
paralysis which makes it incapable of nor« 
mal work. 

The same sort of double-dealing is illus- 
trated by every drug. The primary effect 
of opium is to deaden the pain-sense and 
to bring on an agreeable feeling of well- 
being which leads gradually to sleep. Its 
secondary effect is to stop salivary secretions 



Stimulants and Other Whips 133 

and the functions of other glands, and to 
stop peristalsis. The constipation that 
comes from opium taking is difficult to cure. 

Alcohol, nicotine, chloral, cocaine, and 
all the rest have secondary effects of just 
as undesirable a character. 

To put reliance upon a drug or a stimulant 
is evidently to put reliance upon a treacher- 
ous ally. Nevertheless, there are times 
when a treacherous ally is better than none. 
Modern city life sometimes forces a man 
into situations of such great strain that he is 
in danger of going under. The work that 
a fagged horse does when the whip is laid on 
is not normal work for the horse; but it is 
sometimes necessary. The load may have 
to be dragged a few more miles, and there 
may be only one way to get it done. 

A stimulant is very much like a whip. 
What it really does is to increase a man's 
energy-spending power. A drug does not 
create the energy in the man, any more than 
a whip creates the energy in a horse c All 
it does is to turn on more currentc 

When a man sits down on a hornet's nest 
he is immediately led to expend an unusual 



134 "T^^ Efficient Life 

amount of energy, but the hornet's nest did 
not create the energy. It was stored up 
in the man's nerves and muscles. The act 
of sitting down in the unaccustomed place 
simply enabled the man to spend more 
energy in a given space of time than he 
otherwise would have done. 

Now there is no doubt that one of the 
main reasons for our being here in the world 
is that we may get things done. We have 
work on hand, work which is peculiarly our 
own ; and whether it succeeds or not depends 
altogether on ourselves. There are sure to 
be emergencies, periods of special strain, 
when everything seems to come to a head 
and to need attention at the same time. At 
such a crisis as that it is out of the question 
for a man to stop and rest. He needs to 
keep awake, to keep thinking and planning 
hard, hour after hour. Fatigue cannot be 
any factor in the situation just now. 

Right here stimulants have their place. 
They offer a perfectly rational way of bridg- 
ing the crisis. They enable a man to keep 
tapping his supplies of energy after the 
system itself utterly refuses to give up any 



Stimulants and Other Whips 135 

more. This is abnormal, of course; but 
city life is abnormal too, and it requires us 
to do abnormal things. 

But there is one fact which must be kept 
absolutely in mind: The stimulant does 
not bring any new supply of energy into the 
system. There is not one atom of it added. 
All it does is to open the conduits wider. It 
furnishes nothing except the chance to 
spend faster. 

This fact has a tremendously practical 
bearing. It means that every period of 
expenditure under stimulants must be made 
good by a corresponding period of rest later. 
This is the only possible way of getting back 
the equilibrium. 

In a long race a man cannot make a spurt 
and then expect to take up the regulation 
pace right away. He has to go slower for 
a while until he has averaged things up 
again. A man who boosts himself over a 
tough place by the help of stimulants is in 
danger of forgetting that he has made a 
drain on his energy-supply. He is Hkely 
to jump into his regular work again without 
any let-up. To do this leaves him worse 



136 The Efficient Life 

off every time he takes the stimulant, 
for he never really makes good his over- 
expenditures. He has kept drawing more 
and more upon his capital. Eventually 
he reaches the bottom and goes bank- 
rupt. 

Many cases of this kind have come under 
my own observation. I have had men come 
to me before some important event like a 
big convention in which they had a large 
share of responsibility, and ask for some 
means to keep themselves going at top 
speed during those two or three days. 
After a good many years of experience I 
have learned that it is never safe to consent 
to dose a man up, unless you can get him to 
give you his word of honour that he will 
give himself a corresponding vacation as 
soon as the special strain is over. 

Time and time again men come to me 
afterward and beg to be let off from their 
promise on the ground that they feel so well 
that it seems useless to bother with time 
off. They want permission to go right back 
into regular work. They don't know what 
they're talking about — that's all. 



Stimulants and Other Whips 137 

Excessive expenditure needs to be balanced 
by excessive rest. 

If a principle like this is understood, a 
man has a right to whip himself up with 
stimulants when the necessities of the 
situation demand it. But it is a serious 
business at best, and it ought not to be 
tampered with short of a special emergency, 
and then only under medical direction. 



THE BATH-FOR BODY 
AND SOUL 



CHAPTER XIV 

npHE fundamental difference between the 
class of people we call ^'the great 
unwashed'' and the rest of us is not really 
one of cleanliness. That is merely an ex- 
ternal symbol. The real difference lies 
deeper and is harder to get rid of. Put a 
typical specimen of the '^unwashed'' through 
a Turkish bath, and you will not have 
changed his class. He will not yet have 
entered into the glorious company of the 
washed. 

A scrupulously well-kept skin is usually 
associated with the possession of a culti- 
vated taste, a susceptibility to fine and 
delicate things, a degree of self-respect which 
is more than skin deep. The unwashed 
are the people who have no such per- 
ceptions. 

In her opening address to the students of 
Bryn Mawr college last fall. President 
Thomas brought out this point effectively. 
"'In our generation,'' she said, ""a great gulf 
is fixed that no democracy or socialistic 

141 



142 The Efficient Life 

theories can bridge over between men and 
women that take a bath every day and men 
and women that do not.'' 

And she went on: ''It is the difference of 
which bathing is a symbol that makes mar- 
riage between people of different social 
habits so disastrous/' A man's bath-habits, 
it seems, point back to his ideals of life, to 
his standards of culture. 

The real reason for taking a daily bath 
is not to keep clean. A bath once a week 
would answer such needs well enough. As 
far as the actual demands of health go, we 
could doubtless get along on even less. 
The reason is psychological. Not for the 
body, but for the soul. 

The skin is what separates the individual 
from the universe. It is a line of demarca- 
tion. In a certain sense it is the boundary 

»/ 

of a man's personality. It serves not only 
for protection, but also for information. 
All the knowledge we have of the world out- 
side ourselves comes through the medium 
of the skin. The embryologist has shown 
that all the organs of special sense, sight, 
hearing, and the rest, are simply develop- 



The Bath — For Body and Soul 143 

merits of the outer or skin-layer of the 
embryo. The skin deserves respectful 
consideration. 

From the millions of delicate nerve-end- 
ings on the surface of the body, a continual 
flow of messages is carried along the nerves 
to the brain. Even where the messages are 
too minute to be distinguished, they settle 
for us what we call our general state of 
feeling — whether we feel well or feel dull, 
or out of sorts. 

The more scrupulously the skin is looked 
after, the more responsive it will be to the 
stimuli that it gets from the outside world, 
and the more accurate and well organised 
will be the information which passes on to 
the brain. 

A cold bath in the morning raises the 
level of our mental activity. It wakes us up, 
it increases the supply of energy. A bath 
after the close of the day's work means that 
we have put off the old man with his deeds, 
that we have left the office with its business 
behind and are prepared for something else. 
It is an act of respect to our personality. 

The value of any special variety of bath 



144 The Efficient Life 

depends upon a man's own constitution. 
Nothing could be worse for some people 
than a cold morning plunge. Indeed, the 
very people who are apt to make this habit 
a matter of conscience, are the ones who will 
probably get nothing but harm out of it. 
The thin, nervous man, whose greatest 
danger lies in living too energetically, is the 
very man who will force himself heroically 
into the morning tub. On the other hand, 
the man who is hampered with an excess of 
fat and a sluggish brain will probably stay 
comfortably in bed until breakfast time» 
This is unfortunate. 

What really determines the value of the 
cold bath to a man is the kind of reaction 
which follows it. In some cases this is too 
large. The cold in such cases is too great 
a stimulus and the ultimate result is great 
depression. 

The cases are more frequent where the 
reaction fails to come at all. The heat- 
making power of the body is not great 
enough to respond to the shock. Instead, 
the muscles grow stiff, the skin gets blue, 
and the teeth chatter. The constitution of 



The Bath — For Body and Soul 145 

the man was not made to stand such violent 
treatment. 

In a normal case the first effect of the 
cold water is to take all heat from the sur- 
face of the body. The small arteries and 
capillaries in that region are suddenly con- 
tracted and the blood is driven away. But 
this is immediately followed by a vigorous 
rallying of all the body forces. The muscles 
begin to contract and expand rapidly, pro- 
ducing an increase of heat; the blood rushes 
energetically through the whole system, 
respiration is deeper — the whole activity of 
the body is toned up to a higher level. 

Putting the case formally, a normal 
reaction depends upon five things: 

(1) The Suddenness of the Bath. — You pre- 
vent any good results if all you do is to cool 
the water gradually, so as to make the pro- 
cess easier. That will simply chill the body. 

(2) The Temperature of the Water. — This 
must be suited to each man's reacting power. 
Some people can stand a plunge into ice 
water without any harm; but it would send 
others galley-west. 

(3) The Temperature of the Man. — ^If the 



146 The EfRcient Life 

body is already chilled^ it is probably not 
the right time for a cold bath. 

(4) Muscle-activity. — Shivering is one way 
in which the muscles respond to the shock. 
Vigorous rubbing of the skin, kicking, or 
any other kind of quick exercise for arms 
and legs, hurries things along and makes 
the reaction more complete. 

(5) Habit. — Tho man who is accustomed 
to cold water baths will probably have a 
more effective reaction than the man whose 
body is unprepared for it. It takes time 
to get the habit, and a man cannot judge 
fairly of the value of the bath for himself 
until he has given it a fair trial. Do not 
be too severe with yourself at the start. A 
cold sponge over a small area is a good 
means of getting the thing under way. 

So much for cold baths. The hot bath 
has almost a contrary effect. For a moment 
to be sure, there is a contraction of the sur- 
face blood vessels, but this is immediately 
followed by a relaxing of the muscles that 
control them, and the blood vessels become 
greatly dilated. The skin gets full of blood; 
the heart beats faster. In order to keep the 



The Bath — For Body and Soul 147 

temperature of the body down to normal, 
the sweat glands begin to work vigorously. 

The special use of the hot bath is to draw 
away the blood from some congested part, 
such as the head; also, to relax the tension 
of the system. A man sometimes cannot 
get rest just because he is nervously ex- 
hausted. A hot bath may bring him ex- 
actly what he needs. 

There are a great number of special 
varieties of baths, each of which hits cer- 
tain conditions. On account of the close 
connection between the circulation in the 
back of the neck and that in the nose and 
brain, it is found that cold applications on 
the neck are a help in nose-bleed. A head- 
ache can often be reached by cold-and-hots 
to the same place. 

Bad circulation in liver and kidneys can 
often be remedied by hot applications to the 
surface of the body nearest those organs, 
and other disturbances in the body cavity 
can be affected by the same means. Every- 
body knows the value of local applications 
in the case of a sprain or some other in- 
flammation. A dash of cold water in the 



148 The Efficient Life 

face will often knock out a congestion in the 
brain accompanied by dull headaches and 
make it possible for a man to think clearly 
again. 

But after all, the most practical value of 
the bath as an institution, is the psycholog- 
ical one. When a man is fagged out, a 
good bath will bring back his energy and 
change his state of mind. The increased 
thoroughness of the circulation, the clearing 
of the brain, the stimulus to the countless 
nerve terminals in the skin — all these effects 
have a distinct bearing on those general 
feelings of health and well-being which 
make joyful and efficient living possible. 

People who are down with the "blues'* 
have often gotten over them by taking the 
right kinds of baths. Much pessimism 
has been put out of business by this rather 
unpicturesque means. Much more still 
awaits treatment. 

The only difficulty is that the method is 
so simple. 



PAIN-THE DANGER 
SIGNAL 



CHAPTER XV 

TF YOU have a pain you are conscious 
of it. If you are not conscious of it, 
the pain does not exist. The cause of it 
may be there still; but pain itself is an 
affair of consciousness and nothing else. 

In trying to find out what pain means 
and how to treat it, it is necessary to keep 
this in mind. We tend to act all the time 
as if the pain itself were the bottom fact; 
whereas in reality it is only a sort of indica- 
tor. The bottom fact lies deeper. If a 
man has ether given him, he no longer has 
any pain; yet the conditions that gave rise 
to the pain have not changed at all. 

Pain is like a danger signal on a railroad. 
It is put there for the purpose of attracting 
attention. Something is wrong on the track 
— a washout or a wreck somewhere, that 
blocks traffic. There are two ways of 
treating the signal. One is to cover it up — • 
to act as if it were not there. The other is 
to clear the track. 

You can treat pain in the same way. You 

151 



152 The Efficient Life 

can crowd it under with drugs so that you 
will not be aware of it, or you may try to 
set right whatever the indicator told you 
was wrong. 

When a man is trying to get rid of a pain 
he always ought to ask himself whether he 
is striking simply at the pain itself or whether 
he is getting at the underlying cause. 

There are times when it is perfectly right 
to aim at the pain, It may be intense — 
the kind that drives everything else out of 
your mind, makes thinking impossible; 
and the cause may be too deep to get at 
quickly. Perhaps some important work 
must be carried through; it may be essen- 
tial for a man to stick to his job a little 
longer. In a case like that, no one could 
blame him for giving the knockout to his 
pain sense. 

He does this, however, at his peril. He 
ought to realise the fact. From that mo- 
ment on he has assumed absolute respon- 
sibility for the conditions, whatever they 
are, that gave rise to the pain. When the 
pain itself is not present any longer to re- 
mind him that something is wrong, he is in 



Pain — The Danger Signal 153 

danger of forgetting it, for he has nothing 
but his memory and his will-power to depend 
upon. The danger signal was set and he 
has deliberately run by it He may be able 
to take his train a little farther, but the track 
has not been repaired, and if nobody keeps 
watch of things, there will be a *' smash up/* 

A headache powder does not hit the cause 
of the headache any more than a laxative 
hits the cause of constipation or a spoonful 
of pepsin the cause of indigestion. You 
have cut out the symptoms, but the root of 
the trouble is still untouched. It is a root 
that will keep on sprouting, too. 

Pain is associated with things that are 
harmful — with the forces of destruction. 
That relation is a constant one. Without 
the warning of pain we should have no 
means of learning at first hand what sort of 
experiences were not good for us. We 
could cram ourselves with green fruit and 
never discover that there was anything to be 
avoided in such a diet. Pain teaches us 
differently; and its lessons are not forgot- 
ten over night. 

It is a theory of biologists that pain-sense 



154 The Efficient Life 

was the earUest development of conscious 
life. Sensation first came to some primitive 
invertebrate in sharp stinging flashes — 
sense messages that had a positive effect 
upon its actions. '*Stop, quick/' they 
directed, or *^Let go/' or ^^ Don't eat that 
again'' — signs for contraction, or rigidity, 
or flight. An animal that responded to 
these flashes had a better chance of living 
and producing offspring than one that did 
not. It was for the good of the race that 
pain entered into its experience. 

Pain has never been meaningless. It 
always points somewhere, tells something; 
and if we dare put the extinguisher on it, 
we must not fool ourselves into thinking 
that it is the end of the matter. 

As a general thing, the pain points pretty 
directly to its cause. You can usually put 
your finger on the root- trouble. When you 
have a burnt hand, you do not need to ask 
yourself where the pain comes from, nor 
what it means. 

But this does not always hold. It occa- 
sionally happens that the relation between 
the pain and the cause is complex and hard 



Pain — The Danger Signal 155 

to trace. '^Reflex irritation/' physiologists 
call it. A headache usually belongs to this 
class. It may be due to any one of a hun- 
dred causes, and the one it is finally followed 
back to may have seemed the most im- 
probable of all. 

I have met with cases in which chronic 
headache of the most aggravated iype was 
caused by flat feet. Yet there was no sign 
of pain in the feet themselves, and the per- 
son had never suspected that there was any 
connection there. Even a physician could 
not be sure of it, for often enough flat feet 
do not seem to have any effect on the general 
health. But in these cases, when the diffi- 
culty was corrected, the headache com- 
pletely disappeared. 

It is not quite clear why this should be so. 
Perhaps the spreading of the arch had re- 
sulted in a stretching of the nerves of the 
foot, and this constant tension may have 
reacted on the brain. 

I know the case of one woman of great 
executive* ability who was a nervous invalid 
for years without anyone being able to 
account for her condition. She had to give 



156 The Efficient Life 

up her work completely. She was prac- 
tically confined to a single room. She was 
supplied with plates for her feet. It turned 
out that the cause of her trouble lay exactly 
there, and her recovery followed so quickly 
that it was hard to believe it. 

Reflex irritations may come from difficulty 
in the digestive tract; they may come from 
a bad condition of the teeth or from some 
slight displacement in the reproductive 
organs — in short, from any part of the body. 
So small a matter as the constant pressure 
of a corn may give rise to serious disturb- 
ances in the intestines or the head. 

Perhaps the eyes are the commonest 
source. Strain, in the eyes is hardly ever 
felt there first. Instead it gives rise to 
headaches. A man's eyes may keep him 
in perpetual misery without his ever so much 
as suspecting it. 

These connections between the reflex 
irritation and its real cause are most per- 
plexing and mysterious. They often seem il- 
logical — ^you cannot predict them in advance. 

There is only one way of discovering the 
actual cause and eff'ect relation^ and that is 



Pain — The Danger Signal 157 

elimination. If I have no clue to a per- 
sistent case of headache, the only thing for 
me to do is to make a thorough and de- 
tailed examination of the whole body in 
order to detect any and every condition 
which might possibly account for the 
trouble. One by one all these conjectured 
causes must be eradicated. There is a 
good chance then that the actual cause will 
iSnally be hit on. It is my opinion that every 
man ought to have himself carefully examined 
once a year by a skillful physician who can be 
relied upon to give him trustworthy advice. 

He owes this to himself. A man has no right 
to be wasting his energy or cutting down his 
supply when he could just as well have an 
abundance of it. Pain is costly. It unfits us 
for giving attention to other things. It keeps 
us on a constant strain. It destroys efficiency. 

Simply to blot it out of the consciousness 
is at best a makeshift. To find the real 
cause and to correct it may be a long and 
tiresome process, but in the end it is the 
only economical course of action. 

A good engineer pays attention to the 
danger-signal. 



VISION 



CHAPTER XVI 

/^NE of my friends, a professor in an 
eastern university, has for thirty 
years suffered from almost constant head- 
aches. These vary in intensity from day 
to day, from week to week, but they are 
rarely absent. He goes to sleep readily 
but generally awakes in the middle of the 
night, and is prone to lie sleepless thereafter. 
He has had constant difficulty with his 
stomach, and periods of nervous exhaustion 
when he could do very little work have been 
frequent. 

As a result of this constant pain and the 
nervous exhaustion, his own personal re- 
action to life is much of the time sad. His 
philosophy is deliberately optimistic, but 
during a great part of his life it has to yield 
to the state of his feelings. 

My friend tried many remedies. For 
a year he was under the care of a physician 
who put him on an exclusively meat diet. 
With this there seemed to result a tem- 
porary improvement, but it was not per- 

161 



1 62 The Efficient Life 

manent. He tried long periods of outdoor 
rest and exercise, and he found that mountain 
chmbing and the hke would always help 
him markedly. But the improvement was 
usually of short duration, and upon returning 
to work his old pains and disabilities would 
reappear promptly. 

He next fell into the hands of a specialist, 
who operated upon him for piles. This 
specialist said that all his other symptoms 
of ill health were merely reflexes from this 
trouble. But the results, so far as general 
health and feeling were concerned, were 
negative. 

For a period he was given the modern 
mechanical massage by means of electric 
machines, and his general health was 
slightly bettered; but no profound change, 
no cure of the headaches resulted. One 
physician put him on tonics, such as iron 
and strychnine, but without achieving any 
generally good effect. 

At the age of thirteen my friend had had 
a partial sunstroke. One physician thought 
that his constant headaches might be due 
to permanent dilatation of the capillaries of 



Vision 163 

the brain, induced at that time; but an 
examination made by a speciaHst in nervous 
diseases contradicted this opinion. Appli- 
cations of cold to the head and to the back 
of the neck failed to reduce the symptoms. 
Hence dilatation of the cerebral capillaries 
was manifestly not the cause of his ill health. 
Lastly his eyes were thoroughly examined 
(they had been superficially examined be- 
fore) and glasses were prescribed. There 
was no immediate change and it seemed 
as though the search for health were again 
to result in failure. But then slowly an 
improvement began, and in the course of a 
few weeks it was very real. Presently, 
however, his general condition again began 
to deteriorate. Then it was observed that 
on one of his eyelids was a minute growth, 
which pressed upon the eye and changed 
its shape about one three-hundredth of an 
inch. The removal of this growth acted 
like a magic wand. For a short time he 
seemed perfectly welL He enjoyed life; 
his work was a pleasure in itself, which had 
not been the case for years. His digestion 
was good, and he slept well. But he soon 



164 The Efficient Life 

began to go back. Then repeated ex- 
aminations showed that his eyes are under- 
going a rather rapid change in shape, and 
until this is completed constant readjust- 
ment of glasses will be necessary. 

I have given this picture somewhat in 
detail because, with many variations in 
particulars, it represents the experiences 
of unknown thousands. Probably one- 
quarter of all the educated people in America 
suffer from disturbances of various kinds, 
which are more or less due to eye strain. 

This eye strain in a large number of cases 
creates an extraordinary and altogether not 
to be expected general condition of the body. 
Dr. George M. Gould of Philadelphia, one 
of our most brilliant physicians and writers, 
has in five volumes called attention to these 
general effects of eye strain with such force 
as to secure the assent of most thoughtful 
medical men, by showing that the serious 
disturbances of life in such men as Carlyle, 
Huxley, Wagner, and a score of others, were 
occasioned by strained eyes. 

It frequently happens that persons suffer- 
ing not only from headaches, but also 



Vision 165 

backaches, sometimes indigestion, and even 
hysteria — are cured of these troubles through 
the use of simple spectacles. Professor 
Schoen of Leipsic reports the case of a girl 
with epileptic seizures which v/ere due to 
eye strain. He says that the constant effort 
on the part of the child to bring the two eyes 
into uniform working condition, in the course 
of time brought about nervous disorders of 
an intermittent character and finally resulted 
in permanent disturbances in the brain. 
At first thought all this appears to savor 
of quackery. It sounds as though these 
were impossible associations, but they have 
been proven facts. 

How is it possible that strain upon muscles 
so small as those of the eyes can produce 
such tremendous disturbances of the whole 
organism ? If I should seriously overwork 
one of the small muscles of my forearm, for 
example, the one that moves one of the 
fingers, it would become lame and sore; but 
it would be diflScult for me by means of such 
overwork to produce constant headache, 
backache, nervous exhaustion, and indi- 
gestion. And yet these symptoms are 



1 66 The Efficient Life 

constantly associated with eye strain. It is 
true that by persistent overwork of the 
muscles of the hand, people do get into 
disordered conditions — for instance, type- 
writer's cramp and telegrapher's palsy; but 
these disorders do not seem to involve any- 
thing like the upsetting of the whole system, 
that complete nervous exhaustion, which 
is the result of eye strain. 

The reason for this tremendous result of 
eye strain appears to be at least partly this : 
The effect produced is not due so much to 
the size of the muscles involved, as to the 
relation which those muscles bear to the 
vital parts of the human machinery. The 
pictures that are made in our eyes, and that 
are always being translated into nerve cur- 
rents and reported to the brain, form the 
foundation for our thinking. They con- 
stitute a far larger factor of the brain than 
the mere activity, and through interference 
with it many of the other organisms are 
disturbed. Constant exhaustion and strain 
of these visual centres frequently causes 
disturbances of the most extensive char- 
acter. 



Vision 167 

We might imagine a case in which those 
muscles that move the fingers would play 
a somewhat equally important role — from 
the standpoint of mental operations in- 
volved — as the muscles of the eyes. Take 
the case of a blind man who does extensive 
reading with his fingers and who is engaged 
in work that requires the constant detection 
of small differences by means of his fingers. 
Under such conditions we should expect 
that a derangement of the muscular appa- 
ratus of the fingers would have a far more 
serious result upon a man's organism as a 
whole, than would be effected in those of us 
who do not use the fingers in a way that is so 
directly related to intelligencCo 



II 



The strain of civilisation rests heavier 
upon the eyes than upon any of the other 
bodily organs. This is not because 
vision is more important to civilised man 
than is any other sense, but because man's 
eyes in a civilised community are used 
differently from what they are used in savage 



i68 The Efficient Life 

life. No other part of the body has had the 
emphasis upon its work changed so greatly 
as has the eye. The savage had to look at 
near things and far things, at large things 
and small things, equally — ^^^^hile modern 
man reads. 

The capacity for seeing type belongs to the 
normal eye, and it is only because we have 
tasked this capacity to a tremendous degree 
and for considerable periods every day, in 
order to distinguish the small differences in 
these black marks on white paper, that 
there exists this strain which is producing 
deterioration of the civilised eye. People 
with good eyesight among us have as good 
vision as the savages possess. This has 
been repeatedly demonstrated. But the 
percentage among us of those suffering 
from astigmatism, shortsightedness, and 
longsightedness is indefinably greater than 
it is among them. 

There is another difference between the 
civilised and the savage use of the eye. 
The civilised man will look for long periods 
at things which are at close range. Even 
when he is not reading, he will not see 



Vision 169 

anything farther removed than the wall of the 
room — ^which is but a few feet away. The 
savage, living most of the time out of doors, 
has usually a long focus and he only occasion- 
ally uses the short focus. The house- 
living man most of the time uses the short 
focus, much of the time the exceedingly 
short focus of fifteen to eighteen inches, and 
only occasionally the long focus of the open. 
It is found that deformities of the eye 
increase from year to year during school 
life, thus showing that they are acquired 
and that the school is responsible for making 
them. Approximately one- third of all the 
children in the upper grades of the el- 
ementary schools have eyes which rather 
seriously need correction by means of 
spectacles. 



Ill 



In view of the fact that the most serious 
results of eye deformity and eye strain are 
not indicated by eye pains, how may one 
tell whether or not it is the eyes that need 
treatment.^ There is only one way to do: 



170 The Efficient Life 

Whenever there are headaches or backaches, 
interferences with digestion, and nervous 
exhaustion — ^which symptoms are not clearly 
traceable to and curable by other definite 
measures — the eyes should be examined. 
They are peculiarly vulnerable and they 
must be suspected when there exist symp- 
toms of the kind that I have mentioned 
which cannot be traced wholly to other 
sources. 

What about reading on the cars.^ I 
think this question must be viewed in a 
common-sense way. For example — person- 
ally, I read on the cars most of the time, 
because it is practically the only time that 
I have for reading; and reading is of such 
importance to me that I am willing to incur 
the danger of overworking the eyes in order 
to get the reading done. But we can safe- 
guard our reading on cars and trains in 
two ways. 

(1) We can select for reading that book 
or magazine which has clear type, good 
margins, and lines sufficiently short and 
far apart so that when the eye travels from 
the end of one line to the beginning of the 



Vision 171 

next, it will not be apt to fall on the wrong 
place. By giving attention to these points, 
we are able to read with but a fraction of the 
strain which otherwise such reading would 
involve. The strain of reading in a 
subway, by artificial light, or on a train at 
night, when paper, type, lines, and setting 
are good, is not nearly as severe as when 
opposite conditions obtain. 

(2) There is another thing that we can do, 
and that is to select for reading on the cars 
those books that necessitate more study 
than they do reading. Some articles and 
books we skim over and race through : We 
digest them faster than we can read them. 
Other books require slow reading ; one must 
repeatedly study and think over what has 
been read, or follow out side lines of sug- 
gested thought. This is the type of book 
for reading on trains— the book that re- 
quires study and thinking. 

A little scheme which has been of great 
service to me is that of cutting up books 
which I want to read, so that they may be 
carried in the pocket one part at a time. 
The type of modern newspaper and its 



1-J2 The Efficient Life 

subject matter are not such that I want to 
spend all my time on the cars in reading litera- 
ture of this kind. But by the plan of taking 
books and cutting them into parts, the total 
amount of good literature read by me in the 
course of a month has been about doubled. 
I confess, the first time that I stuck my 
knife into the back of a well-bound volume, 
I felt as though I were committing sacrilege, 
for I love and reverence books: but in view 
of the great profit that I have derived from 
this method of conducting my reading, I 
now do not hestitate to employ it. 

Sometimes I see women on the cars read- 
incr throuc^h their veils. Thev should crive 
up either the reading or the veils. 

A practical thing when reading is to look 
up and off for a moment every little while. 
This relaxes the strain under which the 
eyes are working when they are focussed 
at short range. 

Another point to be kept in mind is that 
while our eyes are adjusted to outdoor light, 
this is always reflected light. A direct 
light injures them. Our eyes can bear the 
briUiant illumination of sunshine, but thev are 



Vision 173 

hurt by having even a sixteen candle power 
electric light shine into them directly. It 
is these irritating streams of light that do 
harm, rather than the general flood of light. 
This is because the pupil of the eye adjusts 
itseh' so as to admit light in proportion to 
the general illumination, and one irritating 
stream of light vv'ill not serve to contract the 
pupil sufficiently. Hence it is particularly 
important for us to avoid reading or doing 
an}i:hing else in a position where a bright 
light shines directlv into the eves. 

The only good plan of lighting a room 
artificially is to use reflected light. That 
is, the electric bulbs should be so arranged 
that the light is thrown upon the ceiling, in 
which case the brilliant carbons are not 
directly visible to persons in the room. This 
method requires more light, but it saves the 
eyes. Light is never pleasant nor safe for 
the eyes when one can directly see its 
source. 

When the eyes are fatigued from long use, 
a cold bath to the face — and particularly 
a cold washing of the eyes — are useful. 
But the main thing is to use the eyes reason- 



174 The Efficient Life 

ably, to secure glasses which will stop the 
strain or abnormal action of the eyes, and 
also to see that they do not become 
disordered. 

Disorders of the eyes not merely affect 
the rest of the body, but the eyes themselves 
in many cases act as a sensitive barometer 
with reference to the conditions in the rest 
of the body. People with weak eyes will 
be far more apt to have eye pains when they 
are suffering from indigestion or overwork, 
than when normal conditions of health 
obtain. In the case spoken of at the be- 
ginning of this article, the eye trouble was 
always an indication of the general health. 
Therefore, it is most important that people 
who experience difficulties with their eyes 
should keep themselves in good general 
health. 



VITALITY— THE ARMOUR 
OF OFFENCE 



CHAPTER XVII 

^T^WO men undergo operations of the 
same character in a hospital. The 
same surgeon does the work. The 
conditions are identical. Equal care is 
exercised in each operation, and each 
is successfully performed. Yet one man 
recovers, the other dies. 

There is a tremendous business pressure 
which does not let up for months. It puts 
men under terrible strain. One man goes 
to pieces and his business is wrecked. He 
cannot keep the pace; he loses control of 
himself. His rival has no better brains 
than he — perhaps not so good — ^yet he pulls 
through successfully. 

We say that there is a difference in vitality; 
that one man has more of it than the otherc 

I once saw a man in a hospital who was 
suffering from five fatal diseases ; and yet he 
would not die. He had kept on living year 
after year in spite of everything. He 
refused to succumb. 

We find the same thing illustrated every 

177 



178 The Efficient Life 

day. In a shipwreck there are many who 
seem to give up their Kves without a struggle, 
without any power to resist. Others cHng 
to an open raft for days without food, 
almost frozen, constantly whipped by the 
waves; but for some reason or other they 
survive. The vitality in them is strong. 

Notice how rapidly and surely one man 
recovers himself after a nervous break- 
down, while another drags along through 
years of semi-invalidism. Notice the results 
upon two men of a long, cold drench of rain. 
One of them comes down with pneumonia; 
the other suffers no ill effects. How is it 
to be explained? 

He has a reserve somewhere, an inner 
power of resistance, an aggressive something 
that will not be downed — and we call it 
vitality. A man cannot have a more val- 
uable asset than that. It means joy in- 
stead of dumps, success instead of failure, 
life, perhaps, instead of death. 

There are different ways of looking at 
disease. The simplest way, the most primi- 
tive way, is to look at it merely as something 
to be cured. This explains the power of 



Vitality — The Armour of Offence 179 

the medicine man, the miracle worker. To 
cure disease is what we constantly ask of 
a physician to-day. But after all, this is 
a mere repair work; it is like patching up a 
leaky boiler. It is necessary — no one doubts 
that; but from the most advanced point of 
view, its place is restricted. It is no longer 
the all-important thing. 

A much larger work is that of prevention. 
In recent years we have begun to realise this. 
We try to provide such an environment for 
a man that disease cannot get at him. We 
provide good ventilation, we purify the 
drinking water, analyse the milk, work out 
problems of sanitation, kill off the germ- 
bearing mosquitoes. It is the distinctively 
modern attitude toward disease. 

But there is another way of looking at 
the mattero It has to do with the vitality 
of a man; it is internal, not external. If 
the external conditions of a man's life are 
important, the internal conditions are still 
more so. If a man is so full of vitality, of 
resisting power, that he beats off every on- 
slaught of disease, he is better off than the 
man who keeps well only because he has 



i8o The Efficient Life 

built a stockade about himself and lives 
inside it. 

One can easily picture a town protected 
by every safeguard of sanitary science, 
furnished with germless food and distilled 
water, on every side completely shut off 
from danger. Yet that town might contain 
a most weak and puny set of people — people 
who lacked power, vigour and health, and 
were entirely unable to do hard work. 
They might have to be constantly fighting 
against breakdowns; they might have no 
capacity for enjoying life. 

Vitality is not simply freedom from dis- 
ease. It is something far more fundamental 
in a man's life than that. It is usually the 
men of tremendous vitality who exert an 
influence upon the work of the world. They 
are the men of power. We can all pick out 
business and professional men who have 
gone to the top because of their vitality, 
their ability to do things, to push, to stand 
strain. 

It is commonly supposed that the bigger 
a man's muscles, the more vitality he must 
have. That is absurd. Some of the most 



Vitality — The Armour of Oflfence i8i 

muscular men I have known have gone 
under because of deficient vitality. They 
had built up tremendously powerful muscles 
on the outside of their bodies; but they 
lacked the inner power — resistance. Many 
of the strong men who go on exhibition have 
sunken eyes, drawn cheeks: they show the 
effects of the vital strain under which they 
live- They are constantly ''too fine.'' They 
are deficient in the kind of strength that 
counts. 

It is true that to do a certain amount of 
physical exercise is one of the ways of con- 
serving vitality; but it is not the most 
important way. The problem goes deeper 
than that. It involves a great deal more 
than the muscular system. It is a matter 
in which the whole personality of the man, 
his body and his mind, are involved. 

Vitality depends on two things: what a 
man inherits from his parents, and what he 
does with himself — his habits of life. 

It is not in his power to control the first. 
If he comes into the world with generations 
of city life behind him, his vitality inheri- 
tance will not be the best. There is a good 



i82 The Efficient Life 

deal in the old saying about the need of 
returning to the soil every third generation. 
Vitality appears to be in inverse ratio to 
the number of years the family has lived 
away from the soil. The children of parents 
who have led the nervously intense and 
exhausting lives of cities are likely to be 
delicate and nervous, and v/ithout the 
ability to stand even an ordinary amount 
of wear and tear. No attention to hygienic 
living, muscular exercise, and the like, can 
make up to them for this deficiency in their 
inheritance. 

Vitality is not a thing that can be created. 
If the organism does not possess it, there is 
nothing for a man to do except to learn how 
to get along as best he can with the least 
possible outlay of energy. 

But most of us are not in that situation. 
We have vitality enough if we will only 
make the most of it — learn how to develop 
and stimulate it. That is the practical 
problem. We have to put up for better or 
worse with our inheritance, but the use we 
make of that inheritance rests with ourselves. 

Maximum vitality and maximum efficiency 



. Vitality — The Armour of OflFence 183 

are tied up with each other. What makes for 
one makes for both. To learn how to attain 
one is to learn how to attain the other. 

Physical conditions are important^ — 
healthy muscles, good digestion, normal 
weight, and the rest; but they need not be 
taken up in detail here. 

The real heart of the problem is psycho- 
logical. We are just beginning to under- 
stand the part that good thinking holds in 
good heath. Our thoughts are just as 
real a part of us as are our bodies. A man 
who persists in thinking unhealthy thoughts 
can no more keep sound and healthy in 
body than a man who violates all the physical 
laws of his nature. 

A man's mental attitude is fundamental. 
It is a well-known fact that the number of 
deaths in an army defeated and under re- 
treat is enormously greater than in an army 
upon a victorious march. The mental atti- 
tude of defeat, of discouragement, lowers 
the resisting power of the individual. It pre- 
disposes him to disease. The whole tone of 
his system is let down. His body becomes 
a fertile seeding-ground for infection. 



1 84 The Efficient Life 

The aggressive, the positive, the confident 
state of mind is the one that wins out over ob- 
stacles. A man who keeps on the defensive 
all the time, dreading danger, fighting against 
bad influences, avoiding disease, not only 
wastes an enormous amount of energy but 
also lessens his own chances. It is not the 
defensive attitude that protects a man. 

It is useless to say ''I will not think of this 
thing." No naan can do that successfully. 
The man who piously resolves not to worry 
about his liver trouble will worry about it 
all the more. He cannot help it. 

The normal way, the efficient way, is to 
turn one's thoughts to something worth 
while — to fill the mind with healthy thoughts. 
This is sound psychology. You cannot 
drag a thing out of the mind; but it will go 
of itself if you put something else in its 
place. A determined pursuit of good 
thoughts, of healthy thoughts, is the only 
means of getting rid of the other kind. 

Carlyle talks about the Everlasting Yea. 
To live the positive life — the life of affirma- 
tion — is to live the life that carries on 
efficiently its part in the work of the world. 



GROWTH IN REST 



CHAPTER XVIII 

/GROWTH is predominantly a function 
^"^^ of rest. Work is chiefly an energy- 
expending and tearing-down process. Rest 
following work is chiefly a building-up and 
growing process. Work may furnish the 
conditions under which subsequent growth 
may occur, but in itself it is destructive. 
By work we do things in the worlds but we 
do not grow by work. We grow during 
rest. Rest is not the only condition of 
growth. It is, however, one of the essential 
conditions. It is peculiarly a topic v/hich 
needs discussion in these days of con^ 
centration. 

We seek concentrated food. We seek 
concentrated reading; the day of the three 
volume novel has passed. We demand that 
the world's news shall be epitomised. We 
demand that our writing shall be taken 
down in shorthand and written by machine. 
We demand that business shall be done by 
telegraph, telephone, or wireless. We de- 
mand that our expresses shall travel fifty 

187 



1 88 The Efficient Life 

miles an hour or more, and that while on the 
expresses we shall be able to economise 
time by having stenographers and libraries. 
We read on the cars. The habit of reading 
during meals is growing. 

All these concentrated activities, these 
ways of doing more work in less time, of 
shortening the period between thought and 
action, between the conceiving of an idea 
and its working out into the real world — or 
perhaps more truly the visible world, 
because the real world is the thinking 
world — make immensely for world achieve- 
ment. But they do not make for growth 
of the self — they tend to dwarf the indivi- 
dual by sapping his power. 

I might caricature this aspect of the 
times by taking a splendid frame and then 
pasting on some neutral background within 
this frame pictures of the world's master- 
pieces. The pictures should be fitted as 
closely as their forms permitted. They 
should be cut in outline, so that no picture 
had a background. Every bit of back- 
ground must be fitted with some other 
picture. Every inch of space should be 



Growth in Rest 189 

economised by filling it with some beautiful, 
worthy thing. In a frame measuring three 
by four feet I could have a large portion of 
the world's masterpieces in representation. 
But it would give me neither happiness nor 
any true conception of these masterpieces, 
for none would have setting or margin. 

Proper setting and proper margin are 
essential to every work of art. So if life's 
work and life's thinking are to result in 
growth, they too must have their margin, 
their proper setting, their opportunity for 
assimilation. 

During the day the chief work of the body 
is done, but during the night the tissues 
grow more than they do during the day. 
The food is worked over, the muscles are 
built up, the brain tissue is restored, the 
vacuolated nerve cells become refilled and 
their crinkled borders become smoothed and 
rounded. This is margin, this is setting. 
It is the working up into the subjective self 
of the food and the results of the objective 
day's work. 

The process is not less necessary with 
reference to mental work. The student 



190 The Efficient Life 

who spends all of his available time in the 
acquiring of facts misses the chief end of 
study. Wisdom does not consist in a 
knowledge of facts, but in their assimilation 
— ^just as art does not consist merely in form 
and colour, but also in margin and setting. 
Our facts need assimilation. They need to 
be worked over into the tissue of our mental 
life. The daily emotions, the struggles, 
the ideals that come to us need to be worked 
over into the self. This occurs chiefly dur- 
ing quiet, during rest. The man who has 
no quiet and no rest assimilates relatively 
little. A man's experiences must be turned 
over and thought about. A man's ideals 
must be dreamed over and dreamed out. 
It may be true that sleep bears somewhat 
the same relation to mental growth that it 
does to physical growth, that thus partially 
or even entirely in an unconscious way the 
facts of daily life are worked over into the 
tissue of character. It is certainly true 
that we often awake in the morning after 
a good night's sleep and find problems 
solved, the mental atmosphere clarified in 
a way that is altogether surprising, and 



Growth in Rest 191 

which is not to be accounted for apparently 
merely by our being more rested. We know 
that the brain is not wholly inactive during 
sleep. We know that there are psychic 
processes going on of one kind or another. 
I do not know what direct evidence could 
be procured to prove or disprove this 
hypothesis. It does seem, however, to fit 
in with very many well-established and 
otherwise not adequately explained facts. 
The best work that most of us do is not 
begun in our offices or at our desks, but when 
we are wandering in the woods or sitting 
quietly with undirected thoughts. From 
somewhere at such times there flash into our 
minds those ideas that direct and control 
our lives — visions of how to do that which 
previously had seemed impossible, new as- 
pirations, hopes, and desires. Work is the 
process of realisation. The careful balance 
and the great ideas come largely during 
quiet, and without being sought. The man 
who never takes time to do nothing will 
hardly do great things. He will hardly 
have epoch-making ideas or stimulating 
ideals. 



192 The Efficient Life 

Rest is thus not merely in order to recuper- 
ate for work. If so, we should rest only 
when fatigued. We need to do nothing at 
times when we are as well as possible — when 
our whole natures are ready for their very 
finest product. We need occasionally to 
leave them undirected, in order that we 
may receive these messages by wireless 
from the Unknown. We need to have the 
instrument working at its greatest perfec- 
tion, be undirected and receptive. 

I am not advocating a mystic ideal. 
This imagery is fruitful, whether these 
ideas and ideals come wholly from within 
and are the adjustment and readjustment 
even of material products, or whether they 
come to us as the response of the individual 
to external stimuli. 

The fundamental characteristic of youth 
is growth — happy, continuous growth. Is 
not the reason why so many of us look back 
to youth as the period of greatest happiness 
because it was the time of greatest growth ? 
I think that the people whom I know as 
most happy in middle and advanced years 
are those persons who have kept on growing. 



Growth in Rest 193 

The as yet relatively little known re- 
searches of Cajal and Flechsig have shown 
us that the tangential fibres of the brain may 
continue their growth at least through 
middle life, and it appears also that the 
fibres are in some way directly related to 
intelligence. 

Most people seem to stop growing soon 
after they become twenty. Other people 
keep on growing for varying periods. The 
duration of life's growth is governed partly 
by heredity and it is partly under our own 
control. It is limited by forced work with- 
out rest and margin. It is promoted by 
w^holesome living. It is interfered with by 
routine work without a break. We must 
retain the habit of doing unhabitual things 
if w^e are to grovv\ 

All this may seem like the statement of an 
impossible ideal. It is not. There will 
come vv^eeks and months when every ounce 
of strength and every moment of time must 
be spent on the accomplishment of certain 
things. But when this is a man's constant 
life, when it occurs month after month and 
year after year, then it indicates that the 



194 The EfRcient Life 

work has mastered the man. The man is no 
longer the master; he is the slave. It 
means that his growth and his capacity to 
do larger and larger things are prevented. 

I know men as secretaries of Young 
Men's Christian Associations, as college 
physical directors, as the owners or directors 
of immense corporations; I know women 
as housewives and mothers of large families, 
who have preserved this balance between 
work and rest, so that they have continued 
growing, so that their ideals have enlarged 
from decade to decade, so that their 
response to life has been ever larger. 

But with these people there has been a 
clear conprehension of the tremendous ten- 
dency of the time away from margin, away 
from restj away from balance. They have 
set their faces like a flint and have not 
allowed the immediate pressure of the 
moment, the drag of the deadly detail, to so 
chain them down as to prevent their moving 
toward the far larger and more important 
ideal that is farther in the distance. 

A dime held close enough to the eye will 
shut out the whole world. The small duty 



Growth in Rest 195 

close at hand may shut out all vision^ all 
ideals. The great ideals are never near. 
The small duty is always with us. There 
are always things to be done. In order to 
achieve the greatest which is within each 
one of us, we must balance between the 
small duties which could never be com- 
pletely done — had we ten times our present 
time and strength — and the distant ideals. 
We must be able to say to the immediate 
and small, ''Stand back! That is your 
place! This is the time for rest, for margin, 
for assimilation, for growth.'' 

Rest is as important as work. Dreams 
must precede action. Concentrated art is 
not art, and the acquiring of facts is not 
growtht 



